Kirkus Reviews QR Code
CHURCHILL'S MOTHER: The Story of Jennie Jerome by Anita Leslie

CHURCHILL'S MOTHER: The Story of Jennie Jerome

By

Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 1969
Publisher: Scribners

The author is her subject's great-niece and the approach is more familial than frank. The pictures will support her claims for Jennie's lifelong good looks, but not one quoted conversation or letter backs up the many claims for Jennie's wit. This biography of Churchill's mother may gain interest from Martin's currently bestselling Jennie, the first of a two-volume effort that leaves off just after the newly widowed Jennie has forever lost her long-time admirer, Hungarian Count Klinsky, and just before her marriage to George Cornwallis-West, a Guardsman of Winston's age. In this book, this courtship, marriage and divorce is glossed, and so is the third marriage to another very junior husband, Mr. Montague Poarch, who is neither introduced nor described at any length. Count on Martin to supply the spicier interpretations and outright gossip on Jennie's romantic diversions and all the players, which is where the readership interest lies. Anita Leslie provides the balancing anecdotal information on Jennie as a belatedly fond mother, a competitive mother-in-law, a distant grandmother, and a patriotic aristocrat at her socially brilliant best in giddy Edwardian days but never willing to slow down thereafter.