A torch, a pillow and a banned book: the queen’s teenage confession, and the reading ritual she shares with the king today. Queen Camilla has spent years championing books, from literacy campaigns to her online book club, The Queen’s Reading Room. But in a new documentary, she finally shared the story of her own first literary thrill, and it is not the title you might expect.
In The Book That Changed My Life, which aired on BBC Two on October 14 and is available on BBC iPlayer, Camilla revealed that as a teenager she secretly read D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Under the Pillow, by Torchlight
“As teenagers, you read a lot of romances,” she recalled. She and her friends kept the novel hidden “under our pillows reading that by torchlight,” HELLO! reports. For a girl growing up in the early 1960s, few books were more forbidden.
Why the Book Was So Scandalous
Lawrence published Lady Chatterley’s Lover privately in Florence in 1928. Its frank depiction of an affair between an aristocratic woman and her husband’s gamekeeper, and its explicit language, meant the full text could not be published in Britain for decades.
That changed in 1960. After Penguin Books released an unexpurgated edition, it was prosecuted under the new Obscene Publications Act. The six-day trial at the Old Bailey, from October 20 to November 2, 1960, became one of the most famous in British publishing history. Prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked the jury: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” The defense called 35 witnesses, including writers, academics and a bishop. The jury found Penguin not guilty, a verdict widely seen as a turning point for freedom of expression.
Camilla, born in 1947, would have been a teenager in the years right after the trial, when the book was suddenly everywhere and still deeply taboo in many homes.
A Love of Reading That Began at Home
Camilla credits her father, Major Bruce Shand, for her passion. He read to his children when they were very young. “We were transported into all sorts of other worlds,” she said. Reading also helped him survive more than two years as a prisoner of war during World War II.
Among the books that shaped her, she names Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities.
The Ritual She Shares With King Charles
The documentary also offered a rare glimpse of royal home life. “My husband and I actually read before dinner,” Camilla said, describing it as a lovely, quiet time. There is one catch. The King “loves biographies and PG Wodehouse,” she explained, and when he reads Wodehouse, she hears him “roaring with laughter,” which she admits is “very off-putting.”
What Her Reading Life Says About Her
For Camilla, reading is not a hobby but a cause. The Queen’s Reading Room now reaches 12 million people in 184 countries, according to HELLO!, and she often cites research suggesting that 10 minutes of reading a day can reduce stress by 20 percent.
Queen Camilla, 79, has made reading one of the defining causes of her role. Her teenage confession is a reminder of something every reader knows: the books we were not supposed to read are often the ones that stay with us longest.