Dark Lady: Winston Churchill's Mother and Her World - Hardcover

Higham, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1852273453 ISBN 13: 9781852273453

Publisher: Virgin Books, 2006

Synopsis

In this sensational new book, bestselling author Charles Higham draws from previously overlooked sources in America and Britain to tell the fascinating story of Jennie Jerome, mother of Winston Churchill — feminist, advocate of Irish independence, and notoriously promiscuous society belle. It charts her luxurious New York upbringing, eyebrow-raising entry into the British aristocracy through marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill, her endless line of liaisons with much younger men and a very different sort of affair in the highest of places — with the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII (one of many kings and princes to win her affection). Long before women had the vote, Jennie broke the rules by campaigning in elections for her husband, Lord Randolph Churchill. A staunch freethinker, she edited her own magazine, fought for Protestant interests in Ireland and sailed a hospital ship to South Africa, where she risked her life in the Boer War. Passionately in love with life, expressive of her sexuality when women were supposed to hide it, beautiful and independent minded, Jennie Churchill was decades ahead of her time.

About this title

About the Author:

Son of the advertising pioneer Sir Charles Frederick Higham, MP, Charles Higham is the author of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, a basis of the film The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. His Mrs Simpson: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor, has been a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and he has written bestselling lives of Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Orson Welles. A former New York Times feature writer and recipient of the Académie Française Prize of the Creators, he lives in Los Angeles.

From Booklist:

Helpful prerequisites to interest in Jeanette Jerome (1854-1921) would be interest in her son, Winston Churchill, British parliamentary politics, or the adulteries of the late Victorian British upper class. Absent those connections, she is a historical footnote, one of the American Gilded Age heiresses flouncing through the country homes of England's cash-poor, title-rich nobility. But with them, Lady Randolph Churchill, as her name became, has everything a celebrity biographer can wish for: beauty and scandal amid a parade of the great and the good of the time. Higham, who has written up Howard Hughes, Wallis Simpson, and several stars of the silver screen, capitalizes on Lady Churchill's joie de vivre for this insouciantly entertaining profile. Yes, she made a few stabs at serving society, but Paris, Ascot, and assignations were greater priorities for Lady C. Three marriages, a half-dozen known swains, and string pulling for young Winston crowd Higham's chronicle, which captures the woman's indomitability. Higham's work is a fine update on decades-old existing biographies of Churchill's mother. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Virgin Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1852273453
• ISBN 13: 9781852273453
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256