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Queen reflects on reading 'forbidden' Lady Chatterley's Lover under the pillow

Queen Camilla has revealed she secretly read Lady Chatterley's Lover by torchlight under her pillow as a teenager, in a new BBC documentary about the power of books.

In BBC documentary The Book That Changed My Life, the Queen speaks about memorable moments in her own reading.

The Long Sip
What happened

Queen Camilla spoke about her lifelong love of reading in a BBC documentary called The Book That Changed My Life, sharing personal memories from her teenage years.

The detail

She recalled secretly reading the then-forbidden Lady Chatterley's Lover by torchlight under her pillow, and said she was mesmerised by Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

And then

The 79-year-old Queen also revealed she and King Charles read quietly together before dinner each evening, with the King's love of PG Wodehouse occasionally making him roar with laughter.

Full story at BBC

What readers are saying

Sim
The detail about her father reading everything in a POW camp - Bible to encyclopedia - shows how books functioned as actual survival, not just distraction. That's what makes the Queen's Reading Room project more than just a book club: it's recognising that access to reading material is genuinely protective for people in isolation, whether that's a prison, a shelter, or grief. It's a welfare issue framed as culture.
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