Her lotus year China, the roaring twenties, and the making of Wallis Simpson

French, a scholar of modern Chinese history (City of Devils, 2018), evokes Shanghai of the 1920s, "a fast-disappearing world of cosmopolitan glamour, political intrigue, and unashamed colonial excess." These adjectives became synonymous with Wallis Simpson as she gained worldwide notoriety for disrupting the British monarchy. Simpson arrived in China in 1924 with her then husband, Winfield (Win) Spencer, who was physically violent with her. The political atmosphere in China was also volatile, with the collapse of the Qing dynasty and warlords jockeying for power. French frames the narrative around the China dossier, which was proffered as a way to keep Simpson from marrying King Edward VIII. He doesn't speculate too much about Simpson's supposed political machinations but seems keener to evoke the vividness of her environs and how they impacted her taste and sharpened her diplomatic instincts. Simpson developed a Far Eastern aesthetic replete with jade, porcelain objets d'art, and a sense of fashion influenced by Chinese flappers, earning her a place on the International Best Dressed List no fewer than 16 times. Recommended for readers interested in Simpson as well as China-U.S. diplomatic history.

An account of the conditions and context of Wallis Simpson's yearlong sojourn in China. About a decade before Simpson became the Duchess of Windsor, she was Wallis Spencer, edging toward divorce from her drunk, abusive husband, Win. A lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, Win was stationed for a time in China with the South China Patrol. Having first arrived in China in 1924 to mend her tumultuous marriage, Wallis remained in the emerging, embattled Chinese Republic for a year that she later referred to as transformative. French, author of the bestsellingMidnight in Peking, traces Wallis' movement between storied hotels and international enclaves in Hong Kong, Canton (Guangzhou), Tientsin (Tianjin), Shanghai, and, finally, Peking (Beijing), with his subject's travels, friendships, and social frolicking forming the spine of his exposition. However, because of limitations on access to archives concerning both the British royal family and Chinese history, the author must rely on sources that sit adjacent to Wallis, including a series of British and American novelists and other expat socialites whose escapades may have been co-opted to fuel sordid rumors about Wallis during the abdication of King Edward VIII. Potential for intrigue and revelation--Was Wallis Spencer an intrepid documents courier for the U.S. Navy?--fizzles into lush and spicy but inconsequential details of the social milieu. In a text riddled with "might have"s, "could not have"s, and "it is possible"s, Wallis does not make for a transparent, substantial, or thoroughly compelling subject. Instead, she feels like a shadow with a hypothetical filling, the import to her trajectory of the year under study only partially convincing. French does, however, strikingly render an oft-fetishized time and place, countering the familiar mythologizing of both the Roaring Twenties, with its Eurocentric literary obsessions, and the path of China from dynastic to communist rule. An occasionally entertaining look at a little-known bridge between American, British, and Chinese history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.