Book description
In 1955, at the astonishingly young age of 34, Clarissa Eden entered
No. 10 Downing Street as the wife of the new Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.
Born Clarissa Churchill in 1920, her uncle was the great Winston, and
when she married the 55-year-old Eden, then Foreign Secretary, at Caxton
Hall register office in 1952, there were crowds as big as the gathering
that had cheered Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding's wedding there
six months earlier.
A renowned beauty, she was at home with her mother's Liberal
intellectual circle, and mixed in her youth with the pillars of Oxford's
academic community - Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and David Cecil among
them: according to Antonia Fraser, she was 'the don's delight because
she was beautiful and extremely intellectual'. Her close circle of
friends included some of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth
century: Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Orson Welles among them. Her
observations and insights into these men and their world provide a
unique window into the mid 20th century. As the spouse of the most
important man in Britain, the hostess at No. 10 and Chequers, Clarissa
Eden was inevitably privy to a multitude of top-level secrets. The Suez
crisis and Eden's ill health meant that she shared just four years of
Anthony's political life and eighteen months as Prime Minister's wife.
This individual, discriminating and honest memoir is her first account
of extraordinary times, intuitively edited by Cate Haste, co-author of
The Goldfish Bowl. Clarissa Eden was born Clarissa Churchill in 1920
and married Sir Anthony Eden in 1952, becoming a Prime Minister's wife
in 1955. Cate Haste is a writer and freelance documentary film-maker.
Cate Haste is a writer and freelance documentary film-maker. Her last
book, The Goldfish Bowl, co-written with Cherie Booth, is about Prime
Ministers' spouses at No. 10 since 1955. Previous books include Nazi
Women, Rules of Desire - a history of sexual mores in the 20th century -
and Keep the Home Fires Burning about First World War propaganda.
