Letter from a Reader 5.12.26

Queen Elizabeth II's sense of style, 'The Devil Wears Prada 2,' John Lanchester, and why I refuse to review the new Pulitzer fiction winner and finalists

Queen Elizabeth II in her dress for Princess Margaret’s 1960 wedding, an outfit shown in a new exhibit / Royal Collection Trust

You need an antidote to despair when even the Pulitzer Prize Board is feeding journalistic ethics into a wood-chipper. I found mine in books and articles about cheerier subjects than the Board’s latest awards: Queen Elizabeth’s fashion sense, “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” and a new thriller about people who say things like, “Want your body, disco doll.”

A new book about Queen Elizabeth’s style

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the mostly covered-up flesh only once. It happened at a Highland games in Braemar, Scotland, as I waited for a kilted hunk to throw a caber end-over-end and have it land as close to him as possible without killing him.

Well, the Games organizers don’t put the goal quite that dramatically. They downplay the potential-death aspect. But you might wonder why if you’ve seen someone hurl a 100-pound wooden log that looks like a telephone pole, as I have.

Caber-tosser at a Scottish festival / Angus Chan via Wikimedia Commons CC: 2.0

I’d taken the train up from Edinburgh for the Braemar Gathering, knowing that the Queen often attended during her summer holidays at Balmoral and it might be the only time I’d ever see her. It was, but “see” is perhaps the wrong verb.

Amid thousands of spectators, I stood too far from the Queen to observe her closely after she stepped from a claret Rolls-Royce and onto the grass at Braemar. I can’t tell you what she wore. But I know more about her fashion needs and tastes after reading about a new exhibit, “Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style,” at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Place, which marks the centenary of the queen born on April 21, 1926.

On view through Oct. 18, the show gathers hundreds of items the queen wore for occasions grand or fleeting. They range from her christening robe and wedding dress to what modern designers might call athleisure wear: “jodhpurs and tweed for Windsor, green serge and tartans for Balmoral,” the English interior designer and author Nicky Haslam writes in the latest issue of the Spectator.

“A major problem in dressing a queen is that—except for a papal audience and state or family funerals—black is never an option; though, as on the occasion of her return from Kenya on accession, she always travelled with a black ensemble,” Haslam says.

In her later years, the queen wore less formal hats, even “wonky double-tier toppers Boy George would kill for,” he adds.

Boy George in a hat Queen Elizabeth might have liked / Wikimedia Commons

The tall hats were for added height as the queen grew smaller with age. But she never gave up her white gloves, black handbag, and sensible shoes.

“This deity may never have worn Prada,” Haslam concludes, “but the exhibition shows that the Queen wore her calling with pride—and her heart not merely on her sleeve.”

If Buckingham Palace isn’t in your travel plans, the exhibit has a just-published companion volume Queen Elizabeth II: Fashion & Style (Royal Collection Trust, 2026), by Caroline de Guitaut with a foreword by Anna Wintour. Shown in sumptuous detail, her clothes look more elegant than you might expect from wire-service photos and CNN news clips. If you have royal-watcher on your gift list, I’d check this out.

Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” / Walt Disney Studios

Quote of the Day: Meryl Streep on ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’

“The first one was a Cinderella story, and this one is more like Pilgrim’s Progress with better clothes. This young woman is going through the Stations of the Cross, every crisis of conscience and betrayal.”

Meryl Streep on how the original film of The Devil Wears Prada differs from its sequel, which stars Streep as a fashion editor and Anne Hathaway as her former assistant who’s returned to her magazine, in “Dressing Up for a Fashionable Reunion,” in the New York Times, May 3, 2026

Cover of the U.K. edition of Look What You Made Me Do and props / Faber

Books I bought this week

Look What You Made Me Do: A Novel by John Lanchester (Norton, 2026) A line in the British novelist John Lanchester’s new psychological thriller seems destined to become a meme: “Want your body, disco doll.” It refers to an old New Yorker cartoon and became a well-off London couple’s private code for: “please hurry up, we’re going to be late.” But Jack dies on page 24 of Look What You Made Me Do, and soon afterward, Kate hears their secret language on a TV show called Cheating, written by the sexy Phoebe Mull. Had her husband been having an affair she hadn’t suspected? I wasn’t looking for another thriller so soon after Tana French’s disappointing The Keeper or for a book about the aftermath of adultery in the wake of Belle Burden’s evasive memoir Strangers. But I’d found Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, smart and well-written, if imperfectly plotted. So I downloaded the free Kindle sample of Look What You Made Me Do, billed by its U.K. publisher as a “black comedy,” and bought it after enjoying the first chapters. Reviews have suggested that it has a few limits, but I plan to read it and hope to give my view soon.

“Books I Bought This Week” is a regular feature of Jansplaining that appears in weeks when I bought books instead of getting them from the library or elsewhere.

Why I refuse to review the 2026 Pulitzer fiction winner and finalists

My reading about Elizabeth II’s Boy George-worthy hats was a lot more fun than learning that a Pulitzer fiction juror took money in the form of a book advance from the publisher of a novel the jury chose as a finalist. I’m sure the Pulitzer people would say—aren’t you?—that the thousands of dollars¹ the juror took from Riverhead played absolutely no role in its giving another Riverhead author a $3000 finalist’s prize! That was a coincidence! Because that finalist wrote a great book worthy of the honor!

Perhaps it’s my tragedy to have had as a mentor a Pulitzer winner who instilled higher standards in his students, or to have known many others who shared his. But I refuse to review any 2026 Pulitzer fiction honorees or future ones selected by an untrustworthy and conflict-of-interest-riddled jury. I try to review books soon after they come out, before they win awards, and I might unintentionally do one that will later show up with a gilt sticker on its cover. But who knows? I could get lucky, as did that Riverhead-linked juror and finalist last week.

1 This is my guess, given that Penguin Random House authors typically receive advances of at least a few thousand dollars, often vastly more, for their books

@JanHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle. She has taught journalism at two major U.S. universities and written for national media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, Glamour, and Salon.

I do not take free books or advance reading copies from publishers but get books I review either from libraries or the independent distributor NetGalley, which provides ARCs with no monetary value to working critics. Paid subscriptions help to support not just the fearless reviews I aim to do but authors whose books I buy for this newsletter. Thank you!

Selected Notes

https://www.rct.uk/collection/exhibitions/queen-elizabeth-ii-her-life-in-style/the-kings-gallery-buckingham-palace

https://www.royalcollectionshop.co.uk/queen-elizabeth-ii-fashion-and-style.html

https://www.amazon.com/Queen-Elizabeth-II-Fashion-Style/dp/1909741949

https://spectator.com/article/how-to-dress-a-queen/?edition=us

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/movies/devil-wears-prada-meryl-streep-anne-hathaway.html

https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324131342