You may remember Princess Alice as the "shadow" dressed in a gray dress and veils during Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. She was a presence that radiated simplicity among jewels and military uniforms, seemingly deceptively distant from the royal family.
Princess Alice, mother of Prince Philip, was a mysterious figure within her own family. She was born deaf at Windsor Castle, in the presence of her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and grew up in England, Darmstadt, and Malta. In 1903, she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, but from then on, her life was overshadowed by wars, revolutions, and periods of exile.
By the age of 35, almost every point of stability had collapsed. Despite the rise of the British royal family, her German family had ceased to be ruling princes, while her aunts who married into the Russian royal family had met horrific fates. Soon, her husband was in danger of being executed as a political scapegoat.
The middle years of her life, which should have followed a conventional and fulfilling course, were anything but. She was the victim of a severe religious crisis and at the age of 45 was removed from her family and placed in a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. As her stay in the sanatorium was prolonged, there was a time when it seemed she would never be released again. However, her achievement of recovery is only one of the remarkable aspects of her story.
