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 4^th 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.