THE REMINISCENCES OF LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
-First American Edition-
1908
First American Edition
The Century Co. [New York]
8vo (470 pages, illustrated, with frontis portrait photo)
Hardcover [Blue cloth]
Item Number: 14413
$75.00
Description
This is a good copy of the First American edition, with significant fading and shelfwear to the spine and covers, else 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.