Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill, The Romantic Years, 1854-1895

Out of her strength, she helped transform a social dilettante husband into one of the most important men in the British Empire; out of her love and ambition, she helped shape her son Winston into one of the great mean of his century. She sent her son the books that moulded his style of writing and speech; used her enormous influence to get him transferred from one war to another; got him his early assignments as war correspondent; acted as agent to sell his first story and his first books; campaigned alongside him in his early elections; opened doors for him to all the important people of his time. But most of all she gave him her courage and her stamina. It was a brassy kind of courage. In the last dramatic scene of her life, the doctor told her he would have to amputate her infected leg. This was a woman whose lovely legs and tiny feet were her special vanity-she had even displayed her collected evening shoes in a glass case. Yet, her answer came calmly and quickly: make sure you cut high enough. Her stamina was also remarkable. In the course of a lifetime, Jennie was editor and publisher of an international literary magazine; organized a hospital ship for the Boer War and traveled with it for its first shipload of wounded: was a pianist of professional ability; took turns as playwright, author, reporter; directed national expositions and theatricals; single-handedly conducted political campaigns at a time when most women were not even permitted to attend the theater alone. At thirty-three, she had married a man younger than Winston, but her beauty was still so extraordinary that the marriage caused only a minimum of surprise. She was, of course, what her world was. It was a world of hypoctritical morals, as faked as the bustle, thinly gilded with pretentious propriety. A Prime Minister's wife once said of Jennie, she could have governed the world. In a sense, she almost did.