Her Lotus Year: Paul French's new biography sets lurid rumours straight

In the mid-1920s, Wallis Simpson spent a year in China. She went there "hoping to make a fresh start" after the breakdown of her first marriage to a "heavy-drinking" US naval officer who was stationed in Hong Kong, said Caroline Moorehead in The Spectator. A decade later, when Britain was tipped into constitutional crisis by the American divorcée's relationship with Edward VIII, her "lotus year", as she called it, became the subject of lurid gossip.

It was rumoured that in China, Simpson had been addicted to opium, posed for pornographic photos, and learnt a sexual technique – the Shanghai grip – which had "infatuated the king". All this was said to have been detailed in a "China Dossier" compiled by British intelligence.

In his new book, the Shanghai-based historian Paul French provides a more sober take on her travels. She had no "louche adventures" in China – just a few "respectable" affairs – and the dossier never existed. "Her Lotus Year" therefore lacks raciness, but is "delightful to read", thanks to French's detailed "knowledge of the place and period".

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Simpson's visit began in Shanghai, where a friend "introduced her to the city's wealthiest circles", said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. She shopped, played poker and attended "tea dances". She then travelled north to Peking, and spent the rest of the year living on the compound of a wealthy American couple while conducting an affair with an Italian gunboat commander. Her grasp of the language was limited – "Boy, pass the champagne" was a phrase she did master – but she was as "embedded in Peking life as a foreigner could be". This is a well researched book, but you can't avoid regretting that the realities of Simpson's life in the East are "less interesting than the myths".

On the contrary, said Thessaly La Force in The New York Times, it seemed to me that French's "beautifully" written book contains "a more interesting story" than the one previously told. And it helps to answer a puzzling question, which is how a fairly ordinary-looking woman inspired such passion in Edward VIII that he was willing to "renounce his hereditary claim to the world's largest empire" in order to marry her. French suggests that in China, Simpson learnt to support herself financially, possibly by acting as a courier for US intelligence. This, he speculates, inculcated in her an "independent spirit" that proved irresistible to a man "burdened by the tedium of royal duties".