Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Clarissa Eden: A Memoir From Churchill to Eden

Portrait of a lady

Clarissa Eden, edited by Cate Haste
Orion, 271pp, £20,

Raymond Carr

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Raymond Carr

Clarissa Eden’s father was the younger brother of Winston Churchill. Her mother was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon. She was born into an upper-class society which still, as in Trollope’s novels, was organised to bring daughters into contact with eligible husbands at summer balls. A beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes, she would have triumphed as a debutante. But she soon got bored with the social rituals of the season; ‘one dance,’ she wrote, ‘was very much like another’. Always independent-minded, Clarissa struck out on her own and sought her chosen friends among artists and writers. She attended Ben Nicolson’s parties where a drunken Philip Toynbee sang communist songs. To the astonishment of her friends, in 1952 she married Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary in Churchill’s government formed in 1951. This opened what she calls the ‘second phase of my life’. Thus her memoirs fall into two distinct parts. Her account of her life before her marriage is based on her correspondence in the days when friends still wrote copious, often daily, letters to each other, a habit finally killed by the mobile phone. The second part contains extracts from the diary she kept after her marriage, skilfully sewn together and put in context by her learned and lively editor.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1) | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

wendy graham

November 21st, 2007 10:16pm

will read the book as fast as I can get my digits on it.

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.