Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Stephanie Barron--That Churchill Woman


DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am so excited to bring you our guest today! Stephanie Barron (or Francine Mathews, as you may know her) is one of my oldest friends in the writing community (our first novels were published the same year,) and I am a huge fan of both her contemporary and her historical fiction. And, Anglophile that I am, I have been holding my breath for THIS book, a novel based on the life of Jennie Churchill, Winston's American mother, for months.

Here's THAT CHURCHILL WOMAN

 

Isn't the cover gorgeous???  

I asked Stephanie what sparked her interest in Jennie.

STEPHANIE BARRON:  As I grow older in my writing life, I’m continually struck by how many of my stories have their roots deep in childhood. Nothing that happens to our minds as children—no vision we absorb, no sound that thrills us—is wasted in later life. I understood this vaguely when I attempted to write my first novel, Death in the Off-Season, in 1992; I set it on Nantucket Island, after Labor Day when the Summer People were gone, and dug myself deep into fog, time, and salt spray. I first saw Nantucket at the age of four, fell passionately in love with it for reasons I couldn’t articulate, and return to its remarkable moors and sand as often as I can. Living there mentally as I write the episodes of my Merry Folger mystery series for the past twenty-six years has been my gift to the child I was.

     So, too, with Jennie Jerome, the center of my latest novel, That Churchill Woman.
 


      
My mother read constantly, although some visual glitch that went unidentified all her life meant that she read with painstaking slowness. She was always elbow-deep in some biography—a fact I barely noticed on a conscious level as a child. As I look back now on her life, which began in 1918, I realize she prized biographies more than any other type of reading. And she specialized in the lives of women. Their stories taught her what could be dreamed, what could be survived, and what could kill you. She read everything Anne Morrow Lindbergh ever wrote, and so, too, at a later date would I. She was fascinated by Rose Kennedy, whose Irish Catholic life held parallels to her own. (I know too much about Jack Kennedy to find Rose anything but terrifying.) I should have noticed my mother’s absorbing interest in the history of women more acutely while she was alive, and we might have talked about it. But I didn’t. I’m putting the pieces together now, when she has been gone almost nine years.

     When I was eight, the mass market paperbacks that sat for months on her bedside table were the two volumes of Ralph Martin’s seminal biography: Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill.

     I remember two things. I was captivated by Jennie’s face on the cover—she was striking, bold, her gaze challenging and direct...and incidentally beautiful. She engaged the viewer immediately and the immediate response, even in an eight-year-old mind, was: Who ARE you? The second thing I remember: My morally conventional, conservative, and law-abiding mother loved her. A woman who broke every rule.

     Jennie has haunted me ever since.



     I’m primarily known as a detective and spy novelist. But what I write primarily historical fiction—and what has come to be called biographic fiction. These are novelistic fantasies about people who actually lived, who have historic records, whose details are known and perhaps ought not to be embroidered for the sake of decency. (As one reviewer whispered worriedly to me once, ‘You imagine JFK having sex!’ And I replied: He was just a college kid named Jack at the time.) The thirteen-volume Jane Austen Mysteries fall into this category; so, too, do my suspense novels about Queen Victoria and Virginia Woolf. I love messing with other people’s lives. There are stories to be mined in the ways those lives might have gone differently.

     In the course of writing my WWII spy novels as Francine Mathews, I spent a good deal of time researching Winston Churchill. He appears as a secondary character in Jack 1939 and Too Bad to Die. And in reading about Winston—in the words of his biographers, most of them male, most of them British—I grew immensely frustrated by their contemptuous dismissal of his mother. Whom Winston absolutely and unequivocally adored. 

     Jennie Jerome Churchill.

     Jennie, in the biographers’ view, was many things--none of them attractive.

     She was self-absorbed.

     Selfish.

     Vain.

     Promiscuous.

     A bad mother.

     Flighty.

     Irresponsible.

     Indifferent to her sons.

     Possibly nymphomaniacal.

     A bad influence.

     Anything but serious.

     Spendthrift.

     Even a whore, perhaps.

     Have I mentioned, a bad mother?

     Oh—

     And she was American.



     It is deeply troubling to those who idolize The Great Man, as Sir Winston Churchill is known, that he is only half-English. They attempt to bury his dubious origins under the mantle of Marlborough greatness, the bedroom in which he first squalled at Blenheim, his doomed father Lord Randolph as an emblem of Parliamentary history. They bury his mother--an American, nicknamed The Dark One, who may have had Iroquois blood in her veins. A woman of no birth or rank. The daughter of a Wall Street Pirate, a self-made man. --A Buccaneer, in fact, to use Edith Wharton’s term. (Jennie and her three childhood friends are the models for Wharton’s Buccaneers.)




     When Winston describes his mother, he is unequivocally loving. She shone for me like the Evening Star, he says in his memoir of childhood. I loved her dearly, but from a distance. Children of upper-class British households were raised by nannies, were seen but not heard, and were sent off to school at an early age. Winston was dispatched at age 8, and was home thereafter only on school holidays. 

Jennie with Jack (L) and Winston
       For this reason, Jennie’s critics decry her as a bad mother. But she at least answered his frequent letters—Lord Randolph rarely bothered. After Randolph’s death at age 45, when Winston was a military cadet of twenty, he and Jennie became comrades-in-arms. When he deployed around the world with the 4th Hussars, she sent him crate after crate of books, and for the first time in his life he began to study deeply. Winston did nothing without her advice. She soon became my ardent ally, he would later write, furthering my plans and guarding my interests with all her influence and boundless energy....We worked together on even terms, more like brother and sister than mother and son. At least so it seemed to me. And so it continued to the end.
 
Winston, 4th Hussars
      I’ve raised two sons. When I read these words, something turned over deep inside. We should all be so lucky as parents to have the gratitude of our children—the recognition of what we’ve given them—as well as their love.

     So, who was right in their portrait of Jennie? --Winston’s biographers? Or Winston himself?

     That Churchill Woman is the result of my four years of thinking about this question. I don’t attempt to answer it; I hope each reader will find an answer for herself. I began with the maps of Jennie’s life—her own book, The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill, which is a partial, discreet, and sometimes fictional treatment of her past; with the two volumes by Martin my mother had read so long ago; with Winston’s vignettes of childhood in My Early Life; and with the vast holdings of the Churchill Archive Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. For six hundred dollars I purchased digital access to the archive for a year, and thus installed an endless black hole on my laptop—because to once enter the files of correspondence between Jennie and her husband, Jennie and Winston, Jennie and her father, Jennie and her sisters...is to be gravitationally caught and rooted in the weight of the past. These people wrote letters as often as we text or tweet, and almost everything has been saved. Even the hurried notes Winston’s doctor, Robeson Roose, sent off to Jennie and Randolph while their son battled life-threatening pneumonia at school at the age of twelve are still there to be summoned and read, in the archive.
 
Jennie by Sargent


     What these docs give a writer of fiction, particularly biographic fiction, is the echo of a voice. There is nothing like a letter—scrawled in effortless copperplate, unique to Jennie’s hand, so visible when enlarged on the screen it begs to be printed and touched—for revealing the soul of the woman. Jennie’s letters ring with wit and laughter; at times they ring with heartbreak and desperation. The scenes she paints—of Sandringham House, Parliament, wildfires in western Canada, the streets of Singapore or Rangoon—are vivid in their color and detail. Never are her letters devoid of emotion or care for her correspondents, her sons most of all.

     A grand-niece once asked Jennie why she had continued to follow her own outrageous path well into her sixties, without much regard for public opinion.

     “I love people,” she said. “I love life.

     Which is why Jennie fascinates. In reading That Churchill Woman, you may decide you don’t agree with her. You may not approve of her choices or decisions. She was a flawed human being. But what a captivating one! Born to Northern privilege before the Civil War, she was fearless, independent, emotionally strong, and immensely gifted. She studied piano under a pupil of Chopin’s, rode hard to hounds, and painted in oils with the Princess of Wales. 
 
Jennie painting at Blenheim, by Winston Churchill
        She was gorgeous, charmed everybody, alienated very few, and fascinated with her wit. She wrote extremely well. She probably wrote many of her husband’s speeches. There is no doubt she’s one reason he was elected—Jennie campaigned for Randolph while he went fishing in Norway and later campaigned for Winston, despite being denied the vote as a woman until the final years of her life. 
 
Jennie campaigning for Winston 1899
She equipped a hospital ship during the Boer War and during the Great War she nursed shell-shock victims, including poet Siegfried Sassoon. She was passionately loved by a prince of the Holy Roman Empire for most of his life, and married three times. She was well ahead of her era, but made peace with it—long before it knew what to do with her. She rode her American unconventionality like a magic carpet, straight through the giddy heights of Gilded Age Europe. And so much of who she was and all she taught is evident in the unicorn who was her son.

     As Winston wrote to her in 1899, upon first taking his seat in Parliament, “In a certain sense it belongs to you, for I could never have earned it had you not transmitted to me the wit and energy which are necessary.”

     I hope each of you enjoys reading That Churchill Woman as much as I’ve loved researching and writing it.

DEBS: I have goosebumps just from reading this. And now I'm going to be haunting my mailbox next Tuesday morning, waiting for my copy of THAT CHURCHILL WOMAN to arrive!  And for more fascinating Churchill tidbits and gorgeous photos, do check out Stephanie's blog.

Stephanie will be stopping in to chat with us, and will give away a signed copy of THAT CHURCHILL WOMAN to a random FIVE readers (US only) who comment and SHARE the post!


The Paris Wife meets PBS’s Victoria in this enthralling novel of the life and loves of one of history’s most remarkable women: Winston Churchill’s scandalous American mother, Jennie Jerome.
Wealthy, privileged, and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by storm when she landed on its shores. As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the twentieth century: her son Winston. But Jennie—reared in the luxury of Gilded Age Newport and the Paris of the Second Empire—lived an outrageously modern life all her own, filled with controversy, passion, tragedy, and triumph.



Stephanie Barron studied history at Princeton and Stanford, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in the Humanities. She is the author of the historical suspense novels A Flaw in the Blood and The White Garden, as well as the critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling Jane Austen Mystery series. A former intelligence analyst for the CIA, Barron—who also writes under the name Francine Mathews—drew on her experience in espionage for such novels as Jack 1939, which The New Yorker described as “one of the most deliciously high-concept thrillers imaginable.” She lives and works in Denver, Colorado. 

101 comments:

  1. Reading this wonderful piece makes me even more anxious to read your book, Stephanie . . . thanks for the glimpse into the life of a most intriguing woman . . . .

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    1. You're so welcome, Joan. I loved living in her world for a while.

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  2. "That Churchill Woman" sounds delicious! I have read, and really loved, both "The White Garden," and "A Flaw in the Blood"--the latter giving me so much to think about long after I finished the book itself. I remember my grandmother reading the two-volume Martin biography of Jennie, and finding her fascinating. Clearly I will have to dig into Jennie's story for myself. That sketch of her by John Singer Sargent is intriguing enough to build a fascinating character on all by itself, don't you think?

    I am always intrigued by how women are portrayed--or slandered--by men with agendas. I recently stumbled into the controversy over what Tchaikovsky's wife was like. Was she really crazy? Or did her husband's friends portray her that way so she would bear the blame for the failure of her marriage? Tchaikovsky was gay, but homosexuality was illegal in Russia in those days, and would have been ruinous to his career. Did she take the fall for him on the personal front, so we could all enjoy "Swan Lake" and "The Nutcracker"?

    Real lives have so much mystery. I can't wait to see what you have discovered in Jennie's life.

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    1. I'm so glad to know someone read The White Garden and Flaw in the Blood, LOL. Are you researching/writing Tchaikovsky's Wife? That's a book I'd wait up all night for.

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    2. I love both these books so much. Time for a reread!

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    3. I stumbled onto Tchaikovsky's wife when I was writing program notes for a concert that included his "Capriccio Italien." His marriage lasted maybe six weeks, at the end of which he was so freaked out he told his wife he was "leaving town on business," hopped a train to St. Petersburg, and basically never came back. He wrote the capriccio while he was touring Italy a year or so later, and in a much happier frame of mind. In the meantime, the Mrs. was left in Moscow with no income and all Peter's friends slanging her about how she was impossible to live with. I smell a rat, but I doubt that I'll try to make a book from it.

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  3. I shall have to read this on so many levels. Thank you for the delightful introduction. I still have my father’s six-volume Gathering Storm set, and remember reading it as a young girl. The books you read as a child do inform your later life.

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    1. Absolutely. For me, it was Austen, Tolstoy, and Dorothy L. Sayers...so go figure!!

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  4. I love this! Thanks you, Stephanie. I knew nothing about Jennie other than that she was American - but now I will be able to learn about her in your book. What a treat.

    I also raised two sons and am so grateful for my relationship with them as adults. It is much richer than I had ever imagined.

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    1. Oh, and I am off to share your post.

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    2. Yeah, I enjoyed my kids at every stage, but now that they're 24 and 20, I totally get how rich Jennie's life with them would have been and why they became the people she championed. You see that in the letters they exchange at that point in their lives. There's an equality that supersedes the parent/child relationship.

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  5. Wow, what a great post and subject. And the sheer amount of correspondence that is available is wonderful. I can't wait to read it.

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    1. Interestingly, archives in England aren't like archives here. By which I mean: I could quote anything in past novels from presidential libraries, from the declassified State department archives, etc., without needing "permission"--all I had to do was cite the quotation's relevant data and the archive itself. In the case of Churchill, partly because he was an author himself, his work is still under copyright--and that includes his correspondence as a child. I had to apply to the copyright holders for permission to cite Jennie's letters, Randolph's letters, her father's letters, Robeson Roose's medical bulletins, and Winston's childish notes sent home from school...and pay for their use, BY THE WORD. After a fairly lengthy process, I was denied permission to cite Winston's letters. I was basically told, from London, that fiction was beneath the Dignity of the Great Man. This was immensely frustrating, of course, but also laughable--one of Winston's earliest books was a novel entitled SAVONAROLA, a thinly-disguised roman a clef about his childhood and Jennie.
      But never mind...

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    2. They happily allowed me to pay for the privilege of citing everyone else in his orbit.

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  6. When I was in elementary school, there was a whole series of "biographies" in the school library about people who had played important roles in the history of America: Clara Barton, "Francis Marion: Swamp Fox", Molly Pitcher (who carried pitchers of water to soldiers during the Revolutionary War), and many others. I devoured all of them. I have loved biographies, especially fictional ones, ever since. I can't wait to read this one!

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    1. I read thise too, Mary! And Jane Addams.

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    2. I must have read Molly Pitcher, because that rings a bell. And people have come up to me at signings and asked whether Jane Austen was the woman who founded Hull House in Chicago...which was Jane Addams...so those biographies must have reached a lot of us.

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  7. This really does sound like it will be fascinating to read! You can bet I am looking forward to it!

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  8. Excited to read this and have you here, Stephanie! How do you decide what should be fact in a book, and what should be fiction?

    And when were you at Princeton?

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    1. I like to know the established record before I embroider it with fiction, Lucy, and usually I'm looking for gaps in the known record that can be filled. In this case, the principal characters wrote so much themselves, that it's more a matter of interpretation of character and events. For example, my take on Lord Randolph is definitely personal and subjective--a historian's reading of what is known and what may have been suppressed. I won't go further, as there are spoilers involved. But I looked closely at his patterns, his circle of friends, the climate at Oxford while he attended Merton...the lengthy trips he took without Jennie, once for an entire year...that sort of thing. And drew conclusions. The conclusions are "fiction" in essence...as is much historical interpretation.
      On a simpler level, I have very few clues what Jennie wore every day, what the interiors of her rooms were like, what the name of her horse might have been...her childhood home in Newport is impossible to identify and was probably razed, as was the family mansion on Madison Square, but at least in the latter case there are photographs of the exterior and descriptions of the inside. So that sort of detail is fiction.

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    2. Oh--and I was at Princeton from 1981-1985. European History major. Stanford from '85-'88, with an MA in history. Didn't like academia, spent my entire reading period for Orals going through the Golden Age mystery cannon instead of the cannon in my field, survived Orals and left to work for the CIA. Never wrote my disseration. :)

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  9. Fascinating! I look forward to reading your book. I also am curious about fact v. fiction.

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    1. I try never to force an action on a character that feels inconsistent with his or her personality or the known record. I find that if someone has left behind a written record, it's immensely helpful at finding my way into a mind and heart. Writing about Jack Kennedy in JACK 1939, for example (as Mathews) was a gift--his childhood letters from Choate are in the Kennedy Library, along with love letters signed in lipstick from a femme fatale he loved in 1941; all his academic records from Harvard, along with comments from his chief academic advisor; his senior thesis manuscript. I knew exactly what he was reading in 1939, while he traveled alone for six months across Europe as Hitler was preparing to invade Poland. His letters to friends from that period in his voice--which feels like Bogart's at around the same time. Knowing how profoundly ill he was at 21, and knowing he used to tell friends he wouldn't live to see 30, I inhabited the mind of a college guy who thought his time was short--and was willing to take risks. Is it Jack Kennedy, truly? No, but it's my truest represenation of a character based on him. Emotional connection to a life is critical for any attempt to portray it on paper.

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  10. Oh Stephanie, thank you for writing this! It sounds wonderful.

    Like Mary Robert above, I remember reading a fair many biographies as a young reader, but I wandered away from them for decades and only rediscovered their joy a few years ago. I still don't read many, but I do enjoy it when I find a good one. Can't wait to read "That Churchill Woman!"

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    1. Thank you. Hope it doesn't disappoint. Some early readers have dinged me for not covering her entire life, but forty years was difficult enough to get my narrative arms around...

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    2. Oh, Stephanie. They they should have written their own books. Geez.

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    3. TBH, I had toyed with showing Jennie as a secondary character in a novel focused on Winston and Clementine during WWI, which would have captured the rest of her life in manageable scenes, but that project's not going to happen--Marie Benedict is apparently tackling Clementine in her next project.

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    4. Oh boo. Would love for you to have done that one.

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  11. Oh, this is incredibly fascinating! Thank you. I love Edith Wharton, and I had no idea Jennie was an inspiration for the Buccaneers! Worth reading that again, too, as a result. Cannot wait to read this. And I love your new persona… Talk a little bit about that!

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    1. You know, Hank, I've had an incredible amount of freedom over the past 26 years to write whatever I find interesting. I owe that in large part to an editor I worked with on 20 of my 27 novels to date, Kate Miciak, who has always felt it's important for her writers to follow their bliss. The one thread that ties both my Barron novels and some of my Mathews ones--espionage novels in particular--is historical fiction using people who've actually lived. The Mathews books tend to have primarily male protagonists (Jack Kennedy, Ian Fleming, Allen Dulles, FDR, Churchill) and the Barron books focus more on women--Queen Victoria, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Jane Austen. And now Jennie.

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    2. Kate is a goddess. You are both very lucky to have worked together. xoo

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    3. Yes, Kate was my editor for three books. She is terrific.

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  12. What a fascinating woman! She's 'aged' well. (I agree, Rose Kennedy has not.) Going to check out Stephanie's blog now.

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    1. I think half Jennie's problem in her lifetime was that she lived too early, Hallie. She's a woman all of us would have understood and enjoyed today.

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    2. By the way, Hallie, that night we signed together in Rhode Island two summers ago...I was en route to research Jennie's life in Newport. It's very fun to remember. I so enjoyed that evening.

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  13. This sounds wonderful! I cannot wait to read it and probably recommend it to my Book Club. We all love biographies and read more of them than anything now. I too, read all of the biographies in school of Molly Pitcher, et al. Isn't it a pity they don't have all of those books for students today? My mother read all of the time too and so we all did. She loved mysteries and biographies so we all do too.

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    1. There's a Reader's Guide for book clubs that may be interested on my website, Altanta. The link is on the main page.

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  14. I don't know who Molly Pitcher was! Going to look her up now!

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  15. I look forward to enjoying this amazing and extraordinary book since Jennie has always intrigued me and I have read about her life. A treasure which is cherished and anything about Churchill is fascinating.

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    1. Great to hear. I've been surprised over recent months by how many people have never heard her name, or knew that she was American. That tells me the time is right, again, to offer up her story.

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  16. Just woke up here in Colorado, friends, and am having my coffee, but there is so much to talk about I’ll be responding to each of your thoughts very soon. Love this conversation.

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  17. Welcome Stephanie. I don't read many biographies and I admit that I'm not familiar with biographic fiction. "That Churchill Woman" will be my first! I can't imagine what it must have been like to access the archives and somehow sift through it to produce a novel. Was it like living a whole other life? Black hole indeed!

    Now I'm asking myself the question "What would our understanding of history look like if the authors of the history books had been women, indigenous peoples and immigrants." Quite different, I''m sure.

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    1. Well, as someone who has studied history while in school, I am convinced that every account is subjective--there is no firm record, only interpretations that reflect as much about the writer as the subject.

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  18. Oh - this sounds delicious. What a wonderful introduction to Jennie. I had no idea how complex her history was, having only heard about her son's reverence for her wit. Can't wait to read the book.

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    1. She's not necessarily a shining heroine. I had no desire to whitewash that record. She's a complex person, in fact, and readers will react to her on an individual basis and form their own judgments about her. That's I want: to spark conversation and debate about one woman and the time she lived in, how it might have influence the man we know as her son. I'm not expecting everyone to love Jennie.

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  19. Impressive post with great background about Jennie whose life sounds like an adventure. when I was young my father had all of Churchill's tomes, his thoughts, speeches and memoirs which he read avidly. This book interests me greatly. I watch anything regarding Churchill and his life.

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  20. I've read some of Stephanie's blog posts but will likely delve deeper into them as I read That Churchhill Woman. I just finished reading her first novel written as Francine Mathews -- I enjoyed it!

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    1. I know the posts--there are a hundred of them stretching back to October--can be a little overwhelming. I threw them up there to give people who might be interested a sort of archive about the period and the people that can read in snippets, for those who want the background. And really? I just wanted a place to post those fabulous dresses!!!

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    2. The dresses are gorgeous!!! I'd read the book just for the descriptions of the clothes:-)

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  21. I'm curious about the whole biographic fiction process, Francine. Obviously, you have an outline of a life. How do you decide what goes in a novel?

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    1. Draft after draft after DRAFT of the manuscript, LOL. I probably wrote ten different versions of this. There is so much material on the cutting room floor. The original take began when Jennie was 9. I had masses of information about New York during the Civil War, when her father was part-owner of the New York Times and the draft riots were burning through the city. All of that didn't make the cut into the final book--only select passages drawn in as flashbacks. The problem for me as a mystery/suspense novelist is that I'm used to structuring books--as perhaps most of us are--on the puzzle plot. An actual life doesn't necessarily have one! I had to figure out how to frame Jennie's story. As I said, some readers were annoyed that I didn't do her entire life. I chose to do in the main the twenty years of her marriage to Randolph, which encompasses a twelve-year love affair and Winston's entire childhood. She was forced to keep several mortal secrets and make choices that involved both personal loss and sacrifice--which to me, were the basis of her story. What ifluenced her character (thus, the flashbacks to childhood), and how did her character guide her life choices? I might personally love writing about 11 year-old Jennie watching Lincoln's funeral cortege winding through downtown Manhattan in 1865, but it didn't fit with that basic story arc.

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    2. So interesting. Did you still plot it out beforehand? Or outline?

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    3. Yes, Debs. It was more a matter of where to begin, and what to emphasize, what to leave out, once I had the initial drafts. The research was there--it was simply how to structure the storytelling.

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  22. I've been looking forward to reading That Churchhill Woman for some time now, ever since I saw Stephanie announce it on her FB page. This is a terrific article.

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  23. Somewhere I might still have a book about Jennie Jerome I bought and read back in the 70s. She was a force to contend with. That Winston loved her as much as he did says a lot. I had gotten the impression that Randolph was a real sorry excuse for a man. Winston did a lot of whitewashing and glossing over trying to restore his reputation. I’ll be very interested in your take on Jennie’s marriage to Randolph!

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    1. That's very much the crux of the novel. I wouldn't call him a sorry excuse--but he was ill, both physically and mentally, which determined the course of his brief life. There is a genetic thread of depression/mania in the Churchill line that descends in part through Randolph's mother, Duchess Fanny--she was in turn descended from Lord Castlereagh, a brilliant diplomat and Cabinet member in Jane Austen's day who was straitjacketed when suicidal, and cut his own throat. He had been accused of homosexuality...

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    2. Winston's Black Dog probably can be linked to that heritage. The Jeromes were irrepressible, optimistic people who never looked back in their lives or struggled with a sense of defeat, no matter what life threw at them. To me, Jennie's the source of the famous "Never, never, never, never, never give up!" Winston left to history.

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  24. Yaaaasssss! Congrats on the release, Stephanie/Francine! I have been waiting for That Churchill Woman ever since Barbara Peters asked you about it during our group signing at the Poisoned Pen two, or was it three, years ago. I can not wait to read it! I, too, am fascinated by women who regard the rules as guidelines and then happily disregard them. I think we all need some Jennie Churchill in us. Did you find that immersing yourself in her life changed your own life or outlook in anyway?

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    1. I suppose she's taught me to look forward, instead of back; and to let go of the things I cannot change. The personal quality that resonated most for me was Jennie's profound sense of loyalty. She never failed to support the people she loved. She was not a faithful wife, for example, but she was a relentlessly loyal one--and I value loyalty in the people in my life.

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  25. History is such an interesting thing. It's a bit slippery, depending on who is telling (or writing) it and what their agenda is.
    Well done to give Jennie an historic "dusting off".
    Libby Dodd

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    1. Well, that thought certainly applies to me! Hope I didn't slip off a cliff, here!

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  26. Can’t wait to read this book. I also read the 2-volume biography of Jennie Churchill when I was much younger and found her fascinating. I absolutely adore biographic fiction and always have ever since I read a novel about William the Conqueror and his queen, Matilda, when I was 12 years old.

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    1. Fabulous. I know nothing about William or Matilda. But I think I studied history because I loved historical fiction first. I KNOW that it was loving War And Peace first that drove me to study Napoleonic France, and the 1812 invasion of Russia. Good historical fiction draws us to educate ourselves about the past, right?

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    2. Yes, it does. I’ve just spent the last half hour looking at your blog. I will need to spend a lot more time looking at it than I have available to me right now. Thank you!

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  27. I've been diving into IMDB to refresh my memories of "Jennie Lady Randolph Churchill," an award-winning UK mini-series I watched on PBS in the mid-70's. My most enduring memories are of Lee Remick in what reviewers might call a "luminous" performance. In a search for current viewing options, I only found it available for purchase from Acorn for $200 for 2 DVDs.

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    1. Yes, and I think Jeremy Brett played Kinsky in that, although I'm not completely sure.

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    2. Just checked -- you are correct about Jeremy Brett. And, looking at IMDB again, Lee Remick does resemble the photos and painting of Jennie above.
      Coincidentally, I was looking in the Harris County Library yesterday for a new standalone by Francine Mathews -- something along the lines of your JFK and Ian Fleming novels. Not disappointed to see there will soon be a new Stephanie Barron!

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    3. Yes, sorry about that--my next Mathews is a Nantucket mystery due soon to my Soho editor!

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  28. Francine, I just realized I forgot to put in your photo (which is wonderful!) Fixed now!

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  30. Wow! That Churchill Woman sounds like a fascinating read and is quickly being added to my TBR list. I so enjoy reading historical fiction, especially about the back-stories of famous movers and shakers. Winston Churchill's mother Jennie is someone I know almost nothing about, so I'm eager to jump in and start learning.

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  31. This blog post is such a powerful hook and you have caught me. I've put this atop my list. Congratulations to you, Stephanie, on what I'm sure is a tour de force. Can't wait to read it!

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    1. If you do get a chance to read it, please send on your thoughts via my website, www.stephaniebarron.com. Writing is a solitary profession, and I value feedback--whether it's postivie or negative.

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  32. Your new book sounds wonderful! I look forward to reading more about Jennie Jerome Churchill. I wonder if she was like Lady Cora from the Downton Abbey series. Perhaps they were from different generations? I recall a bbc series about Winston Churchill with Robert Hardy as Churchill. There was a scene where he was talking after he was hit by an automobile in New York. He said his name was Winston Churchill, son of Jennie Jerome of New York. I visited Blenheim Palace and saw letters that he wrote to his parents and to his beloved nanny.

    This is a wonderful post and the photos are beautiful!

    Diana

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    1. I've always assumed Lady Cora was modeled on one of the wealthy American women of Jennie's generation who traded cash for coronets. Jennie was one of the very first, along with her childhood friends (who all met in Delmonico's dance classes, summered together in Newport, and went on to boarding school outside Paris together). Jennie, who married Lord Randolph; Consuelo Yznaga del Valle y Clemens, who married Viscount Mandeville; Alva Erskine Smith, who became Alva Vanderbilt and named her daughter after Viscountess Mandeville; and Minny Stevens, who was eventually Lady Arthur Paget. One of Alva's sisters married Connie Mandeville's brother. Consuelo Vanderbilt of course married Jennie's nephew Sunny, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, so the circle was drawn even tighter. Lady Cora is definitely a pastiche of very real women.

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  33. You got me all caught up in Jennie again just by reading this post. I've loved that woman for decades-- ever since my mother brought Ralph Martin's biography home. When I learned you were writing about her, I was thrilled. I'm waiting impatiently for Saturday when my birthday present to myself will be having you sign my copy of THAT CHURCHILL WOMAN at The Poisoned Pen.

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    1. Oh, YEA, Cathy! I'll be so glad to see you again! Looking forward!

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  34. Jennie Jerome Churchill sounds like a fascinating woman. I really enjoyed reading about her and her influence on Winston Churchill's like. Sounds like an interesting book, looking forward to reading.

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    1. I hope you find the time to read it, Dianne, and I hope it gives you pleasure.

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  35. So fascinating Stephanie. It's my birthday soon and your book will be my gift to myself.
    Don't put me in the draw, I'm from Quebec

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  36. I'm hoping to get to Quebec in May.
    Actually, I was supposed to visit LAST May. As I was checking into our Air Canada flight online the day before our departure, I noticed my husband's passport was...expired, LOL. So much for THAT 30th wedding anniversary trip...

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  37. I read all the grade school library's biographies except for Hitler. I couldn't get through his. My parents and I read tons of historical fiction when I was growing up. I still read historical mysteries like your Jane Austen stories and romances. Also I read a lot of autobiographies.

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    1. I love it when I can compare an autobiography to biographies of a person, as I was able to do with Jennie. It's so clear what she left out, revised, or sidestepped in her personal version of events...

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  38. Just want to thank all the Reds, and every person who stopped by to talk, for having me in your neighborhood today. It's always one of the best places to be. Happy reading, everyone!

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  39. You are the best, Stephanie! (Francine:-)) A fabulous guest!

    And I am thrilled to know there is a new Nantucket book coming!

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  40. I just now read this piece--so fascinating! And touching. I love that Stephanie took a nuanced look at Churchill's mother. I'm eager to read this novel!

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    1. Thanks for reading the post, Jess. I hope you get a chance to delve in.

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  41. Fascinating. Going on to my TBR stack! Shared

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  42. Such a great post, and I can wait to read all about Jennie Jerome Churchill. I have started reading Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope Mysteries and just finished Mr. Churchill's Secretary which has left me wanting to learn more about Winston Churchill and his background. Thanks so much for visiting Jungle Reds ~ (Beautiful book cover!)

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    1. Susan Elia MacNeal's entire series is terrific.
      I love the cover--which a number of us fretted over for a period of a few weeks until we got it right. I think of it as Tiffany blue, which is just perfect for the era.

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