Dark Lady: Winston Churchill's Mother and Her World (Hardback)

Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of England's greatest statesman, was a single-minded and dynamic woman, who overcame the scandal of a criminal father and an upbringing spent largely in exile in Europe, where she survived revolutions and mass murders, to be the first American woman to conquer London society and play a major role in British politics. In this sensational new book, best selling auther Charles Higham draws form previously overlooked sources in America and Britain to provide much that is startlingly new. Decades before women had the vote, Jennie broke the rules by compaigning at elections for her husband, Lord Randolph Churchill, pushing him from obscurity and uselessness to the most spectacular parliamentary career of the late Victorian era. The couple's role in the acquistion of Upper Burma's rubies and railways has disturbing parallels with the Iraq campaigns of our time. But, with her support, Lord Randolph exposed the wholesale corruption - and resultant major loss of life - in the Army and Navy, the real and never-previously-given reason for his notorious resignation from the gorvernment in 1885. Among Jennie's lovers were an Austrian spy, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish earl, and various noblemen who, lier her second and third husbands, were in the same age group as her magnificent son, Winston Churchill. the age difference caused her to become the centre of a number of scandals, and she defied the political enemies t bring a powerful influence to bear on Winston as Home Secretary, when she urged him to bring about prison reform. A staunch freethinker, she edited her own magazine, fought for Protestant interests in Ireland and sailed a hospital ship to South Africa, where she risked her life in the Boer War. Decades before it finally became a reality, she also fought for a National Theatre of Great Britain. Passionately in love with life, expressive of her sexuality when women were supposed to hide it, beautiful and independent minded, Jennie Churchill was decades ahead of her time.