THE REMINISCENCES OF LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

Description

This is a very good copy of the Third Impression of the First English edition. There is a former owner’s name in in ink on the front pastedown. The contents are otherwise fine.
Winston Churchill’s mother, JEANETTE (“Jennie”) JEROME (1854-1921) was born in Brooklyn and married Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill in April 1874. Her relationship to her son Winston was famously “affectionate but distant.” Lord Randolph died in 1896. In July 1900 Lady Randolph married George Frederick Myddelton Cornwallis-West (twenty years her junior). They were divorced in 1918. In June 1918 she married Montagu Phippen Porch (twenty-five years her junior), a colonial official serving in Nigeria. The difference in their ages prompted her famous remark, “He has a future and I have a past, so we should be all right.” Winston Churchill’s close friend and personal secretary Edward Marsh described Jennie Churchill as “an incredible and most delightful compound of flagrant wordliness and eternal childhood.” Her reminiscences are enormously entertaining.