For Diana, her final year was in many ways the most fascinating and insightful of her life. It was a turbulent, often amazing period in which she formally severed her marriage ties to the heir to the British throne, fell passionately in love with Dodi al-Fayed, and truly began to come into her own after years of personal adversity. In the first hours and days after the news of Diana's death in Paris shocked the world, major media outlets from CNN to NBC turned to Donald Spoto for help in articulating the meaning of the tragedy and understanding its effect on the British monarchy, the worldwide public who admired and loved her, and, most important, her own family. In The Last Year, Spoto tells for the first time the complete story of a woman in conflict. Diana was driven by a philanthropic desire to relieve suffering and change the world for the better. But she was also determined to make up for a youth that was taken from her, at the age of nineteen, when she entered the restrictive and, from her perspective, decidedly chilly House of Windsor. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, Diana in her last year was re-creating her public and private self.