The Churchill Sisters
The Extraordinary Lives of Winston and Clementine's Daughters
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
As complex in their own way as their Mitford cousins, Winston and Clementine Churchill’s daughters each had a unique relationship with their famous father. Rachel Trethewey's biography, The Churchill Sisters, tells their story.
Bright, attractive and well-connected, in any other family the Churchill girls – Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary – would have shone. But they were not in another family, they were Churchills, and neither they nor anyone else could ever forget it. From their father – ‘the greatest Englishman’ – to their brother, golden boy Randolph, to their eccentric and exciting cousins, the Mitford Girls, they were surrounded by a clan of larger-than-life characters which often saw them overlooked. While Marigold died too young to achieve her potential, the other daughters lived lives full of passion, drama and tragedy.
Diana, intense and diffident; Sarah, glamorous and stubborn; Mary, dependable yet determined – each so different but each imbued with a sense of responsibility toward each other and their country. Far from being cosseted debutantes, these women were eyewitnesses at some of the most important events in world history, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. Yet this is not a story set on the battlefields or in Parliament; it is an intimate saga that sheds light on the complex dynamics of family set against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.
Drawing on previously unpublished family letters from the Churchill archives, The Churchill Sisters brings Winston’s daughters out of the shadows and tells their remarkable stories for the first time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Trethewey (Before Wallis) delivers a breezy group biography of Winston Churchill's surviving daughters Diana, Sarah, and Mary . The girls' mother, Clementine, took frequent vacations away from the family to guard her mental health, and as children they joined their father at political events and on the campaign trail. During WWII, they all took active roles in the war effort, as was expected of the prime minister's daughters. Sarah, recently separated from her first husband, left her stage career to sign on with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and accompanied her father to conferences with Allied leaders at Tehran and Yalta. Meanwhile, Diana, who was married to her second husband and raising children, served as an air-raid warden and worked in a munitions factory. After the war, she divorced again and struggled with mental health issues before dying by suicide in 1963. Mary, the "stable sister," actively supported her politician husband's career and raised five children. Trethewey's less-than-robust historical context offers little insight on the sisters' political influence on their father and the nation, but she sets a brisk pace and succeeds in depicting a trio of intriguing women at a perilous moment in world affairs. Women's history buffs will be entertained. Illus.