Playing the marriage market

Although the publishers assure us that this study of three sisters is ‘one of glamour, money and love in equal measure’, Fortune’s Daughters should not be confused with the new novel by The Spectator’s most decorative diarist, Joan Collins, entitled Misfortune’s Daughters. Elisabeth Kehoe’s book is non-fiction and covers, as the sub-title puts it, ‘The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie’.

While it is doubtless fair to say that this is ‘the first ever full biography’ of the American sisters who snared British swells in the late 19th century, the path seems to have been pretty well trodden — and rather more lightly — before by such writers as Anita Leslie, Leonie’s granddaughter, whose books included biographies of the sisters’ father, Leonard Jerome, Jennie and Clara’s erratic husband, Moreton Frewen, otherwise known as ‘Mortal Ruin’. Nonetheless, with the Churchill industry still going strong (did you know that Jennie’s elder son, Winston, was nicknamed ‘Carrot Top’?), the story is probably still worth another airing, and the author has done an impressive amount of research.

Unfortunately, though, she is let down by an inelegant style of writing. We have to suffer split infinitives, clumsy formulations (‘pleasure-seeking lifestyle’) and embarrassing solecisms (‘the Derby horse race’) which do not inspire confidence in her grasp of the subject. I know that we are not supposed to fuss about such things in Blair’s Brave New World, but the ch