Sarah Ferguson Opens Up About The Unique Way She Dealt With Prince Andrew's Scandals
It can be hard to keep track of the drama surrounding the royal family as it seems to be continually developing. In the case of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, things seem to be going back and forth between bad and worse. A Peacock documentary called "Prince Andrew: Banished" came out on October 5, and as one might guess from the title, it's not a glowing review. Prince Andrew stepped down from royal duties, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for his brother, King Charles III, to bring him back to work.
Here's a quick timeline of Prince Andrew's fall from grace. In 1999, three years after his divorce from Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, Prince Andrew met Jeffrey Epstein, financier and later convicted sex offender, per The Mirror . Virginia Giuffre claims that Prince Andrew sexually abused her three different times in 2001. Fast forward to 2019 and Epstein was arrested for sex trafficking and committed suicide in his jail cell, and in November of that year, Prince Andrew was interviewed for BBC Newsnight about his connection with Epstein and the allegations by Giuffre. The interview was a train wreck, and it did nothing to help Prince Andrew's case, per The New York Times. In 2022, Prince Andrew settled out of court with Virginia Giuffre, and the queen stripped him of his military titles.
So what did ex-wife Sarah Ferguson do to deal with all this?
Sarah Ferguson used writing as stress relief
While her ex-husband found himself buried in scandals, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, turned to writing. "A Most Intriguing Lady" is the name of the Victorian-era book that she wrote as a way to deal with the stress of Prince Andrew, Duke of York's sex abuse scandals, per The Times. Writing the book during such a tumultuous time was, as Ferguson put it, a way to "be joyous" and "escape through my imagination." Being an author has also been a way to hold her own as an individual in the public eye.
From publisher HarperCollins, the book is "a sweeping, romantic compulsively readable historical saga about a Duke's daughter—the perfect Victorian lady—who secretly moonlights as an amateur sleuth for high society's inner circle." The book is set to be released on March 7, 2023. The duchess gave the queen a copy of the novel in French, though it's not known if the queen read it before she died, per the Daily Mail.
This is Sarah's second romantic novel. "Her Heart for a Compass" was released in 2021, and it was also about the daughter of a duke in Victorian England: Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott, who is also one of Ferguson's ancestors, per People.