Dark Lady: Winston Churchill's Mother and Her World
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 TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved