Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #320093 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Virginia Rounding, DAILY MAIL
'Clarissa has a ready wit and a deliciously dry sense of humour.'

Review
'Clarissa has a ready wit and a deliciously dry sense of humour.' (Virginia Rounding DAILY MAIL )

'a riveting account of London in the 1940s and 1950s - intelligent, wry and sharp. Her memoirs will become an important historical document...' (Jane Ridley LITERARY REVIEW )

'the point of this book is its personal portrait of an extraordinary woman, fiercely independent since childhood... makes for lively reading.' (Raymond Carr THE SPECTATOR )

'a tantalising memoir, with sharp observations and anecdotes, seldom cutting and never downright rude... one is left wishing for more...' (Ivan Fallon THE INDEPENDENT )

'Her character bounds off every page - wry, steely, inscrutable' (Ed Smith THE TIMES )

'more like a character from a novel than a real person... she might have been invented by Evelyn Waugh...' (Dominic Sandbrook DAILY TELEGRAPH )

'As a piece of social history it is a delight, but it is more than that... brought together with charm and clarity, creating a picture of a world now gone that sometimes appals but mostly enchants.' (Norma Major MAIL ON SUNDAY )

'The book's importance lies in its myriad insights into the personalities of many of the most important artistic, social, literary, political and cultural figures of the mid-20th century... significant work of social and cultural history' (Andrew Roberts THE SCOTSMAN )

'Her writing is understated, carrying the light, ironic inflections of her class and period... She sits next to the great and quietly skewers them' (THE ECONOMIST )

'highly entertaining... crammed with good things.' (THE OLDIE )

Raymond Carr, THE SPECTATOR
'the point of this book is its personal portrait of an extraordinary woman, fiercely independent since childhood... makes for lively reading.'

Customer Reviews

DON'T MISS
Memoirs of beautiful and captivating women tend to be about their amorous conquests. In Clarissa Eden's memoir, discretion underlines a passionate nature, a wry and acerbic view of life and all that it has brought her. It encompasses the strain and fun of youth as well as marriage to a British Prime Minister - it is such a good read and has the best ever captions to all the photographs.
John Stefanidis

2.50 stars
First, I have to say I disliked the form that this memoir took. From chapter to chapter, there are introductory and explanatory paragraphs from the editor, Cate Haste, then Clarissa Eden's own reminiscences, and later on in the book, her diary entries from the 1950's. I didn't find Cate Haste's writing especially illuminating.

Truth to tell, I dislike the glut of "tell-all" memoirs that have been flowing out of publishing houses for the past five years or so, but Clarissa Eden's memoir goes to the opposite extreme. It is incredibly UNrevealing. She is perhaps a little terse and sometimes catty about certain Americans, and speaks warmly of Harold Pinter's writing in one paragraph. Brief instances like these are about as close as the reader gets to what Clarissa felt and thought about the varied personalities in her circle and how they enriched (or not) her life. For example, she tells the reader about her friendship with Lord Berners, but "tells" about it in such a flat way. There's no, I don't know, sympathetic impulse; there's no warmth flowing through the remembrance.

Throughout the memoir it's as if she's holding herself at a distance from all the circumstances and experiences she had, or at least, holding the reader back from knowing more detail about them. "Distant" is a good way of describing this memoir. As a reader, I felt I was being held at arm's length from really learning about this woman and her times. Very disappointing.

julian
What a sad waste. I hoped to learn something new, particularly about the Suez emergency and the personalities in politics at that time.This book,however,struck me as entirely superficial,enormously name dropping and stopping short whenever the author approached anything interesting . Cocktail party chatter(all right,at it's best).