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The Viceroy's Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters
 
 
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The Viceroy's Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters (Hardcover)

by Anne De Courcy (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 431 pages
  • Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2 Oct 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0297819771
  • ISBN-13: 978-0297819776
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 4.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 630,938 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Irene (born 1896), Cynthia (b.1898) and Alexandria (b.1904) were the three daughters of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898-1905 and probably the grandest and most self-confident imperial servant Britain ever possessed. After the death of his fabulously rich American wife in 1906, Curzon's determination to control every aspect of his daughters' lives - including the money that was rightfully theirs - led them one by one into revolt against their father.The three sisters were at the very heart of the fast and glittering world of the Twenties and Thirties. Irene, intensely musical and a passionate foxhunter, had love affairs in the glamorous Melton Mowbray hunting set. Cynthia ('Cimmie') married Oswald Mosley, joining him first in the Labour Party, where she became a popular MP herself, before following him into fascism. Alexandra ('Baba'), the youngest and most beautiful, married the Prince of Wales's best friend Fruity Metcalfe. On Cimmie's early death in 1933 Baba flung herself into a long and passionate affair with Mosley and a liaison with Mussolini's ambassador to London, Count Dino Grandi, while enjoying the romantic devotion of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. The sisters see British fascism from behind the scenes, and the arrival of Wallis Simpson and the early married life of the Windsors The war finds them based at 'the Dorch' (the Dorchester Hotel) doing good works. At the end of their extraordinary lives, Irene and Baba have become, rather improbably, pillars of the establishment, Irene being made one of the very first Life Peers in 1958 for her work with youth clubs.


About the Author

Anne de Courcy is a well-known writer and journalist. In the 1970s she was Woman's Editor on the London Evening News; in the 1980s she was a regular feature-writer for the Evening Standard; she joined the Daily Mail in 1992 where she has done interviews, historical features and book reviews, as well as editing a page on readers' dilemmas. She has written eight books, including a biography of Diana Mosley to appear after the subject's lifetime.
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3.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The sordid, selfish reality behind the glitz., 3 Sep 2001
By denis@ddwatkins.fsnet.co.uk (Pembrokeshire, Wales. UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Viceroy's Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters (Women in History) (Paperback)
...This is a hugely entertaining tale of of an upper strata of society utterly convinced of its own worth and superiority. The viceroy's daughters were at its core and many the major characters of the era figure in the story. The insights into their lives are fascinating and are vividly described. Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader who married one of the daughters, for example, was a serial adulterer with minmal concern or interest in his own children.

The book describes the travails, adventures, virtues and vices of the daughters with a pace that never flags. An added, and major bonus, is a highly diverting early section on their fascinating father. The view behind the glitz often reveals appalling behaviour but there are also examples of self sacrifice and commitment to others. This is an enthralling and balanced account of a vanished era. Telling the tale through the lives of three women who were at its core works brilliantly.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is simply delightful which gave hours of pleasure., 24 Jan 2001
I thought that this book was a complete delight to read as it gave me insight to what actually happened during the first forty years of the last century.

I would highly recommend this as an excellent read.

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Readable, intimate, sympathetic account of Ld Curzon's 3gels, 5 Nov 2000
By A Customer
In the realm of sibling biography the Mitford sisters have long held the floor while the Curzon sisters sat it out; safely aloof and largely unknown. Endowed with their diaries and letters - and the blessing of their sons and nephews - Anne de Courcy has turned the spotlight on to Irene, Cynthia ('Cimmie'), and Alexandra ('Baba') Curzon for almost a century from Irene's birth in 1896 until Baba's death in 1995. Through their parents and partners, the sisters' lives span and intimately intersect the world of the Souls, the Raj, the Abdication, the British Fascists, the Cliveden Set, and the Dorchester clique during the Blitz. Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill, George V and Lloyd George, Elinor Glyn and Nancy Astor, Dino Grandi and Jock Whitney, Lord Halifax and Walter Monckton, the Mitfords and the Windsors all appear and make their mark. While Miss de Courcy manages to focus on the three girls, two particular men bestride the pages and dominate their lives. The first is their father, George, Marquess Curzon of Kedelston - Viceroy of India, and British Foreign Secretary. He was brilliant, energetic, passionate, ambitious and vain, obsessed with pomp and ceremony, a strict and distant father who used his wife's enormous wealth and (after her early death) his daughters', to acquire and restore great houses and surround himself with all the luxuries of a potentate. By the time of his death, in 1925, another colossus had entered the lives of his daughters - Oswald Mosley, known as 'Tom', a gifted, flashy, flawed baronet and politician. Although photographs of the young Mosley make him look like a slightly absurd early Hollywood villain, his magnetism and libido were such that, apart from Cimmie, whom he wed, he bedded both Irene and Baba, as well as their step-mother! He hopped from bed to bed until he found the most beautiful of the Mitford sisters, Diana Guinness; he also jumped from party to party - from Tory, to Labour, to New - until he found Fascism. Within a year, Cimmie died of a burst appendix and, according to her sisters, a broken heart. By then Baba was married to Fruity Metcalfe, the Prince of Wales' best friend and, when the Duke of Windsor, his best man. This did not prevent Baba becoming Mosley's lover while Irene became a mother to his children. A pattern was set for the rest of their lives: Baba took a succession of lovers, invariably eminent men of influence and wealth; while Irene, the eternal aunt, suffered a series of unsuitable suitors, finding herself in travel, her charges and good works and losing herself in the bottle. Anne de Courcy, the biographer of the legendary between-the-wars political hostess, Circe, Marchioness of Londonderry, is very much at home with the lives of the British aristocracy. She has made deft use of Irene and Baba's diaries and all three sisters' letters, which so vividly express their rivalry and rows, their disappointments and despair, their jealousies and joys. Some diary entires, however, are plumbed too far - that Lady Ravensdale had piles in 1932 is more than one needs to know. Detailed descriptions of fashions and furniture may delight some readers as they enrich the text with a period flavour; for others there may just be too much marble, gilt and Worth, too many silver fox furs and candlesticks. The Viceroy's Daughters is not as elegant as Nigel Nicolson's biography of their mother Mary Curzon, nor as scintillating as Superior Person, Kenneth Rose's early life of their father, nor as riveting as James Fox's brilliant biography of his grandmother and great-aunts, The Langhorne Sisters; but it can be commended as a very readable, intimate, and sympathetic account of three sisters' lives at the epicentre of a glamorous elite in the first half of twentieth century Britain. Mark McGinness
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