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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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