A Memoir: From Churchill to Eden

When Cherie Booth and Cate Haste's account of modern Prime Minister's wives'The Goldfish Bowl', was firstpublished, then broadcast on television in 2005, much attention focused upon the widow of Sir Anthony Eden, Clarissa, who at the astonishingly young age of 34 had entered No. 10 Downing Street as the wife of the new Prime Minister. Born Clarissa Churchill in 1920, her uncle was the great Winston, and when she married the 55-year-old Eden, then Foreign Secretary, at Caxton Hall register office in 1952, there were crowds as big as the gathering that had cheered Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding's wedding there six months earlier. A renowned beauty who was equally at home with her mother's Liberal intellectual circle, she had mixed with the pillars of Oxford's academic community - Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and David Cecil among them and according to Antonia Fraser was'the don's delight because she was beautiful and extremely intellectual'. She knew some of the most illustrious people of the twentieth century: Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Orson Welles among them. Her observations and insights into these men and their world provide a unique window into the mid 20th century. When Eden won the 1955 General Election, Clarissa became the spouse of the most important man in Britain, the hostess at No. 10 and Chequers, and inevitably privy to a multitude of top level secrets. The Suez crisis and Eden's ill health meant that Clarissa shared just four years of Anthony's political life and 18 months as Prime Minister's wife. This individual, discriminating and honest memoir is her first account of extraordinary times, intuitively edited by Cate Haste, co-author of'The Goldfish Bowl'.