THE colourful and mysterious story of a woman who lived for 44 years at Napsbury mental hospital just outside St Albans will be told in a BBC radio programme next month.

Opal Whiteley, who preferred to be known as Her Royal Highness Françoise Marie de Bourbon-Orléans , as she claimed to be the daughter of an exiled French prince, lived at the hospital outside London Colney from 1948 to her death in 1992.

The facts of her life are much disputed by her fans and detractors in the USA, where her childhood diary, published in 1920, is regarded as a literary classic.

But it is agreed she was born in 1897, possibly in England, but brought up in a rural part of either Washington or Oregon.

She was certainly a very precocious and observant child, who absorbed a vast amount of information about the plants and wildlife of the area where she was brought up, as well as classical literature.

As she entered teenage years she gave popular talks on wildlife and entered the University of Oregon in 1916.

Her diary, which her publisher claimed was destroyed by her and later reconstructed from scraps of paper, records her childhood adventures and relationships with animals, with details her supporters argue cannot possibly be contrived.

It was a major success, both in book form and serialised in magazines, while her story has inspired many other books as well as several stage plays, a film and a musical.

It is unclear how and when Opal returned to England, but she was admitted to Napsbury Hospital suffering either from schizophrenia or the effects of a head wound inflicted by a wartime bomb.

She was a conspicious and popular patient at Napsbury, where she was known as Princess Francoise.

Who was Opal? will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30pm on Tuesday, January 5.