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Item Condition: Used; Very Good
"She could have governed the world,"
wrote Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister's
wife: "an outstandingly brilliant woman...
a host of facets seemed to sparkle at once,"
wrote Daisy, Countess of Warwick: "I have
no recollection of her," said Lord Curzon,
"that is not instinct with affection and vitality
and joy.
"My mother," said Winston
Churchill, "was everything to me."
Had she been only the mother of Winston
Churchill, Lady Randolph Churchill's place
in history would be asured. But the beautiful
Jennie Jerome, born in Brooklyn to a flam-
boyant New York stocks and property
speculator, was a startling personality in her
own right, who came to wield unprecedented
political influence in her time. After a child-
hood among New York's famous upper crust
"400", she grew to maturity in Paris at the
Court of the Emperor Louis Napoleon III and
the Empress Eugénie before coming to
England to the stilted atmosphere of the
widowed Queen's Court and the sharply
contrasted, gay, extravagant, scandal-secking
and scandal-loving aristocratic "Society" of
the Marlborough House Set of the Prince of
Wales.
At Cowes she met and fell at once in love
with Lord Randolph Churchill, the second
surviving son of the Duke of Marlborough.
Both sets of parents were against the marriage
-the Jeromes were aiming higher than a
courtesy title for their daughter, the great
Marlboroughs had doubts about