Princess Beatrice Read From "The Great Gatsby" at Sister Princess Eugenie's Wedding

This has been the year for British royal wedding. And Friday’s nuptials between Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank featured an unexpected nod to the U.S. when Princess Beatrice read a passage from The Great Gatsby. Yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece that is considered one of the great American novels, largely for the way it explores themes of corruption, mortality, and the fallacy of the American dream — you know, all that fun stuff.

So it does seem odd that Beatrice, who was handling maid of honor duties for the day, chose to read a passage from a book in which two characters, oh, I don't know, are killed by its end. The passage, according to the Cut, is the novel’s protagonist, Nick Carraway, describing Jay Gatsby’s smile:

“He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.”

Now, we’re no English lit professors, but this doesn’t seem to be the most flattering description of someone. But as it turns out, there was a perfectly good explanation for Beatrice’s choice. According to Reuters, the Dean of Windsor, David Conner, who officiated the wedding, explained that the bride had read The Great Gatsby shortly after meeting her husband, and “the passage reminded her of her future husband’s own smile.”

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