Portrait of a lady

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.

Going to university in the 1930s was almost inconceivable for a girl of her class, so she embarked instead on a process of self-education. Sent to Paris to ‘finish’ at the age of 16, she discovered Braque and attended Paul Valéry’s lectures at the Sorbonne. She ignored her mother’s warning that she was getting into the wrong set. In London she studied art at the Courtauld and began her interest in philosophy. Dissatisfied with her ‘useless, dilettante academicism’, in October 1938 she settled in Oxford, which, she writes, ‘changed my life’.