My review of The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, by Charlotte Mosley (Editor)

The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters

by Charlotte Mosley (Editor)

My rating 5 out of 5 stars

'I also think a volume of letters will have to wait until everyone's dead, don't you, because of hurt feelings?' Diana to Deborah, 17 August 1980.

Such was this potential 834 page can of worms, comprising just an estimated five per cent of the sisters' letters, yet effectively telling six interrelated life stories: the daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney Bowles (Sydney's father founded English Vanity Fair and The Lady magazines, employing son-in-law David to manage The Lady).

The Mitford saga lends credence to the adage 'truth is stranger than fiction'. You couldn't invent such tales. Hardly a week went by in the 1930s without one of this sextet making headlines.

The opening letters, from 24 July 1925, show the interwar halcyon years, the English country lives of the Mitford girls. Mainly home-educated by governesses, most are well read thanks to their grandfather Algernon Freeman-Mitford's legacy which included a stately family library.

Debutante of 1922 and Bright Young Thing Nancy is 20, flitting to and from her London and Oxford social scenes. Pamela is 17, Diana 15, Unity 10 and Jessica 7. Little Deborah is just 2, her first letters not appearing here until she approaches her tenth birthday in 1930.

To subsidise her father's tight allowance, Nancy starts writing, encouraged by literary amigo Evelyn Waugh. Initially uncredited in society gossip columns, she then sells signed articles, until in 1930 The Lady gives her a regular column (presumably helped by family connections). She soon attempts novels, basing characters on relatives, friends and acquaintances.

If Nancy's literary enterprise is a gamble, her love life is a fiasco. She is soon ditched after a futile lengthy engagement to effeminate gay aesthete Hamish St Clair Erskine, four years her junior, second son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn and ex-lover of her brother Tom. On the rebound, she is engaged to erratic Peter Rodd, second son of Sir Rennell Rodd the soon-to-be ennobled Baron Rennell. The marriage will become largely a sham.

But Nancy's exploits are eclipsed by the younger Diana, who in 1929 wins over her naysaying parents and marries brewing heir Bryan Guinness who will inherit the barony of Moyne. Such a great society beauty is she that family friend James Lees-Milne calls her 'the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'. Evelyn Waugh dedicates his novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to Diana and Bryan. Her portrait gets painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.

Diana triggers scandal in 1932 by leaving her husband for British Union of Fascists (BUF) head Sir Oswald Mosley. As Mosley does not intend leaving his wife 'Cimmie' (Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India) Diana lives in a flat as his mistress, until in 1933 Cimmie dies of peritonitis.

With Unity along for the ride, Diana then ingratiates herself with Adolph Hitler's circle on Mosley's covert bidding for a commercial radio station on German soil to fund Mosley's BUF. In 1936 Diana and Mosley secretly marry in Joseph Goebbels' Berlin house, with Hitler a guest. Unity is meanwhile swept away, a Hitler devotee and Third Reich fanatic, basing herself in Germany much of the time.

In 1937 teenage Jessica, the 'red sheep' of the family, having long saved to run away, elopes to Spain with second cousin Esmond Romilly, Communist nephew of Winston S Churchill. Romilly finds work reporting for the News Chronicle and, after legal obstacles caused by their parents' opposition, they marry and move to London, in the poor industrial East End.

On 20 December 1937 Jessica has a baby, Julia, who dies the following May in a measles epidemic. In 1939 Jessica and Esmond emigrate to the USA. When WWII starts Esmond enlists in the Royal Canadian Air Force, leaving Jessica in Washington D.C. carrying another daughter, Constancia. After a bombing raid over Germany, Esmond goes missing in action on 30 November 1941.

Nancy meanwhile discovers in the summer of 1938 she is pregnant, but miscarries. In early 1939 she joins her husband Peter Rodd in the South of France as a relief worker, assisting Spanish refugees fleeing Franco's armies in the civil war. Soon afterwards Rodd, commissioned into the Welsh Guards, departs overseas and Nancy, back in London, has her second miscarriage.

The early war years are gruelling for all, except maybe Pamela who always took life in her stride. She has married the brilliant 'rampantly bisexual' scientist and heir to the News of the World Derek Jackson (becoming the second of Jackson's six wives). From around now too, relations between Jessica and Diana permanently freeze, their political rift so deep it becomes personal.

On 29 June 1940 Diana, prised from eleven week old Max Mosley, is interned without charge in Holloway Prison under Defense Regulation 18b, a dangerous person to the state, tagged 'England's most hated woman'. With Mosley already interned separately in Brixton Prison, Diana pines for her husband and four sons (two from each marriage). The couple reunite in Holloway in December 1941, lodged in a flat on prison grounds, thanks to Mitford cousin-in-law Prime Minister Winston S Churchill. Both are released in November 1943, on grounds of Mosley's ill health, and placed under house arrest until war's end at Mosley's Crux Easton property in Berkshire.

Nancy's first four published novels, satirical farces, have seen no great acclaim. Her husband fights overseas. She does war work in London's blitz, first as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) driver. Then at a Paddington casualty depot, writing with indelible pencil on the foreheads of the dead and dying. Then in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk. Also helping refugees billeted at her parents' London house in Rutland Gate, requisitioned to accommodate Polish Jews evacuated from Whitechapel. An affair with Free French officer André Roy results in a third pregnancy. Nancy again miscarries, with complications leading to a hysterectomy in November 1941. Convalescing, at a loose end she works as an assistant at Heywood Hill's Mayfair bookshop and literati hangout, becoming the shop's social nucleus.

Unable to reconcile with war, Unity publicly shoots herself in the head at Munich's Englischer Garten. She survives with bullet lodged in brain. Hospitalised unconscious in Munich for weeks with Hitler suppressing news coverage, she is 'missing' to her family in England. After two months her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale hear from a clinic in neutral Switzerland, where Hitler has had her sent. Transporting Unity home by ambulance, Lady Redesdale becomes her carer. Permanently impaired with a mental age of twelve, Unity is volatile and incontinent. This compounds the stress on the Redesdales' marriage, caused by political differences. They permanently separate.

Deborah at first helps with Unity, then after marrying in 1941 roams England following in-training Cold Stream Guards husband Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. By war's end she has lost two babies, her only brother Tom, four best friends and two brothers-in-law. Her husband has unexpectedly become heir to his father's dukedom.

The post war years I found the most gripping. Unity dies aged 33 from her lingering gunshot wound. Nancy enjoys a literary breakthrough with The Pursuit of Love, gives up on her unhappy marriage and moves to Paris to be near new love of her life, Charles de Gaulle's right hand man Gaston Palewski. Bedecking herself in haute couture she becomes an ardent Francophile, nicknamed by her sisters the 'French Lady Writer'.

Diana and Mosley, social pariahs through their politics, move to France near to Nancy, becoming friends and neighbours of fellow pariahs the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the abdicated King Edward VIII and twice divorced Wallis Simpson, whom he has married).

The 1950s are for me the centrepiece of this epic, with the sisters at their peaks. Nancy's writing career soars while her adoration of Palewski is never fully reciprocated, their coupling never formalized. His diplomatic career and other romances leave Nancy in the shadows, over years their relationship trickling to naught. Nancy's acerbic wit, irresistibly funny, shields a tortured woman. Unrequited love, loneliness and sisterly jealousy are thought her underlying issues. She also reveals having felt unloved by her mother (a complaint shared by none of her sisters).

Deborah has become Duchess of Devonshire, soon-to-be hostess of royalty and world leaders (she is also related to the Kennedy's by marriage). She administers historic Chatsworth House, her husband's 35,000-acre family seat which was institutionalized for WWII. Planning to move in, she oversees its colossal restoration. She is also Châtelaine of Bolton Abbey estate in Yorkshire and the Lismore Castle estate in Ireland. She involves herself in local charities and functions, supervises staff, shares her husband's interest in thoroughbred racehorses and breeds Shetland ponies.

Jessica, war-widowed and remarried, could not be more different. Renouncing her gentrified roots, she is a naturalized American and Communist Party USA member, living in Oakland, California. In her 10 November 1951 letter to Deborah, who contemplates visiting, Jessica writes: 'We lead an extremely non-duchessy life here. For instance, if you want to stay with us you would have to sleep on a couch in the dining room, we don't have a spare room here ...' Jessica becomes an American civil rights figure and bestselling author as celebrated as Nancy. The older of her two little boys, Nicholas, is killed in 1955 when hit by a bus. She never speaks of it. Mellowing, she resigns from the Communist Party in 1958.

Pamela, teased fondly by her sisters who nickname her 'Woman', shuns world affairs and keeps to country life. This is reflected in Poet Laureate John Betjeman's unpublished poem The Mitford Girls, ending with a line about his favourite: 'Miss Pamela, most rural of them all'. Living variously in England, Ireland and Switzerland, she is the least active correspondent (perhaps mildly dyslexic, notes the editor), yet deliciously dotty. Divorced with huge settlement, she sets up home with an Italian horsewoman, her life companion. Never remarrying, she is thought to have become 'a you-know-what-bian' as Jessica writes to her husband in 1955 when first visiting Europe with her American family.

The sisters' frail old father Lord Redesdale dies in 1958. His estranged wife, their mother, soon follows. As the seasons turn we witness the inevitable peaks and troughs, stumbling across some heartrending tragedy, fabulous triumph or side-splitting gem.

Take for instance Nancy's shriek-worthy nickname 'Pygmy-Peep-a-toes' for five-foot two-inch Princess Margaret, who is constantly in the headlines over her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend and whose open-toed shoes Nancy thinks vulgar.

Or Deborah's nickname 'Cake' for the Queen Mother, given after a wedding where, on hearing the bride and groom are about to cut the cake, QM exclaims 'Oh, the cake!' as if having never seen it happen before.

Their drollery and regal 'Mitfordese' drawl recurs throughout ('Do admit!' 'Do tell!' 'Please picture!')

As the 1960s and '70s unfold we see the sisters age and face social revolution, while old grievances to one another fester. These include: whether Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels invents episodes of their growing up years to match Nancy's fictionalized versions in The Pursuit of Love; whether their brother Tom, killed in WWII, was a Communist supporter, Nazi sympathizer or neither; and Nancy's spitefulness.

Diana, Deborah and Jessica become grandmother's (one of Jessica's two African American grandsons will later become legal scholar and Professor of Law at Yale James Forman Jr.).

In 1972 Nancy, in poor health, is made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She is soon diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, dying on 30 June 1973 at home in France and cremated, her ashes buried in England alongside sister Unity.

We now witness the remaining sisters forwarding each other's letters when ganging up against each other beneath the smiling repartee. Later ones, after Nancy's agonizing death, betray simmering resentments towards her and Jessica, the two who forged independent careers rather than leaning on marriage for wealth.

This backstabbing of the self-made two is by the most privileged two, Diana and Deborah, though Deborah is more Diana's sounding board for the most part. As the only sister to remain consistently on speaking terms with all the others, Deborah is the natural mediator, though this becomes harder as her husband battles alcoholism.

As they further mature, we see their growth, especially of Diana (once 'England's most hated woman'), essentially so kind yet understandably tortured in rare moments. In exile with Mosley she has time to ponder, more so after his 1980 death. She suffers from deafness. She writes prolifically, memoirs, biographies, book reviews, translations and commentaries on her heyday, ever remorseless of her pre-war connexions. In A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography she reiterates, 'I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting.'

Only years after Nancy's death will Diana learn from released classified files of Nancy's treacherous role in her wartime internment. Nancy had 'informed' British Intelligence agency MI5 that Diana was 'a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler [who] sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general.' She had later made official behind-scenes noises to prevent Diana's release. Though Jessica had also (from America) lobbied against Diana and Mosley's release, she had not later feigned amity, unlike neighbourly Nancy whom Diana had devotedly supported through her protracted terminal illness.

Towards the close of the 20th century two more sisters leave us. Pamela, hospitalized after a fall, dies in London on 12 April 1994. Jessica dies in the USA of lung cancer, aged 78, on 22 July 1996, her ashes scattered at sea. She is survived by her widower and two of her four children. Her deep rift with Diana is never healed, their only brief contact having been while politely visiting the dying Nancy.

The voices taper down to Diana and Deborah, the only two left in the new millennium. The last published letter, from Deborah to Diana, is dated 5 January 2002. When Diana dies in Paris in 2003, leaving no sisters for Deborah to exchange letters with, there's a poignancy finishing this enormous book.

Diana was described in a Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003) editorial, after her death, as an 'unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming.' According to her Daily Telegraph obituary, a diamond swastika was among her jewels.

She was survived by four sons: author Desmond Guinness; Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne; Alexander and Max Mosley. Her stepson, novelist Nicholas Mosley, wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Diana never forgave him. Two of Diana's grandchildren, Daphne and Tom Guinness, and her great-granddaughter Jasmine Guinness, became models.

Deborah lived eleven more years, producing published works from memoir to gardening to cookbooks, a whole series on Chatsworth House. Made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) for her service to the Royal Collection Trust, she died widowed on 24 September 2014, aged 94. Her funeral was attended by family and friends, six hundred staff, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. She is survived by three of seven children, eight grandchildren (including model Stella Tennant) and eighteen great-grandchildren.

We cannot pity this youngest, longest living and most advantaged sister, who had such a good innings, yet she comes off as the stalwart figure of the piece and enormously likeable.

Charlotte Mosley's masterful editing and footnoting is a work of art, her generous chapter introductions setting the scene for each period. There's an indispensable index of nicknames, of which the Mitfords had so many, plus a helpful family tree and scholarly rear index.

One must concur with J.K. Rowling's comment on the front cover: 'The story of the Mitford sisters has never been told as well as they tell it themselves.'

This is the ultimate Mitford fan ride.

 

My review of Honey Trap by Anthony Summers

Honey Trap

by Anthony Summers

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Profumo affair – one of Cold War Britain’s most famous political scandals – is an indelible flash in my early childhood. Framed by so many vivid, epochal images of my formative years, this fiasco became a defining mark of my generation. For this reason, reading Honey Trap in my sixties was an irresistible lure down memory lane. 

A neighbour passed on to me the browned and curling paperback, which he had scored for fifty cents in a leisurely browse through our local op shop. Two distinct passages of time come into play here: the twenty-five years approx between the events the book covers and its publication, and the thirty years between its publication and my getting around to reading it. As if two lifetimes divide the present from the story of Honey Trap. 

This staggered chronological detachment sets an intriguing and reflective context from which to revisit the scandal, which saw Britain's War Minister John Profumo and Soviet Embassy naval attaché cum spy Yevgeny Ivanov sleeping with the same woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler. The affair's exposure and alleged resulting friendship between Profumo and Ivanov forced Profumo’s 1963 resignation from Government. 

As with other such investigative books, I saw the movie it inspired ('Scandal' 1989) long before reading this. Sir John Hurt stars as sleazy but lovable Establishment scapegoat, bon-vivant Dr Stephen Ward, who introduced the lethal Profumo affair trio and was later hounded to suicide. Sir Ian McKellen plays disgraced War Minister John Profumo. Joanne Whalley is showgirl-turned unwitting spy mistress Christine Keeler, with Bridget Fonda shining as Keeler's sharp cohort Mandy Rice-Davies. Authentic '60s & '70s glamour puss Britt Ekland is fellow seductress Mariella Novotny. Veteran screen legend Leslie Phillips graces the project as Conservative hack Lord Astor. Its haunting soundtrack includes the delectable Dusty Springfield/Pet Shop Boys hit 'Nothing Has Been Proved'. 

The movie's scenes, paired with the original media events they depicted, replayed through my visual memory as I turned each moldy page in wonderment, sneezing at the confetti of dust sprinkling my pillow yet compelled to pursue this nostalgic trip, kept awake into the small hours of three gruelling, impetuous nights.

As per its genre, Honey Trap is more a gripping factual account than a literary experience, so I had adjusted my expectations accordingly (these pieces I find intersect for comfort and convenience with heavier/fictional reads).   

While devouring it as I might a cold pizza on a Sunday morning, I could only ponder in astonishment at what a fuss was made of this tawdry diplomatic bedroom farce, while feeling so sad for Stephen Ward. Of course, certain classified intelligence files would now be accessible that had not yet become so when Honey Trap was penned, outdating various lingering question marks. Yet we hear very little in this wake, as if this book's authors had indeed concluded all there really was to conclude. In that sense, Honey Trap may never become truly outdated. *

(*A more recent publication, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Cambridge historian, Professor Jonathan Haslam, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, reveals how the Profumo affair was a higher threat to UK security than previously thought. It finds that the Russian, Ivanov, was able to photograph top secret documents left out by Profumo after being shown into Profumo’s study by his wife, actress Valerie Hobson. Those documents concerned US tactical nuclear weapons and vital allied contingency plans for the Cold War defence of Berlin. Yet little else has emerged, especially concerning the MI5 and MI6's possible roles in Stephen Ward's 'suicide'. Nor has it ever been clarified whether Ivanov aimed to use Keeler to entrap or obtain information from Profumo. Haslam's new research shows Ivanov did not need to use Keeler thus, ultimately being able to steal information directly from Profumo. This resulted from Profumo's lack of office organisation and security protocol. Profumo left top secret documents visible on or in his home desk while out of his study, failing to secure the room or instruct family members to guard against entry. Consequently, when Ivanov visited Profumo’s home socially, Mrs Profumo invited him to wait alone in her husband’s study. Ivanov merely needed to pull out his spy camera and take snaps, including of highly classified specifications for the X-15, a top secret experimental high-altitude US spy plane. But that's another book, decidedly more academic and less concerned with the sordid lust triangle that Honey Trap focuses on.)

Whilst I found Honey Trap's incessant meandering back through certain characters' darkened pasts irksome, along with the sheer volume of these incidental characters, this loss of momentum is often the price for the requisite thoroughness. Even so, the authors (or publishers, or both) seem set on burdening us with the bedroom quirks and petty agendas of a whole establishment rather than three of four main characters. This is my common issue across much reading, non-fiction and fiction alike. If more authors would just stay focused, instead of rambling off track with scarcely related trivia that consumed them in their quest for background padding! We, the reader, are unconcerned with such superfluity. We don't want to be led in pointless circles just to hear about some secondary character's spouse's sibling's boss's partner's irrelevant part-time sexual fetish, just for that extra shot of shock value. 

These gratuitous muckraking delays border on cheapening the effect of the mighty yarn that is Honey Trap. Such, however, is the gossipy nature of this beast. It's perhaps inevitable that the telling of a scandal will be over-embroidered with such, like an ornate cake with too much icing (is there such a thing, some might argue). There's an art to gauging enough titillation then stopping, before tabloid quality looms.

That said, anyone who remembers these times may well tut along with me at Honey Trap's vaguely tacky sentiment, while hypocritically slurping it up anyway. I plead guilty as charged. I'll read it again too.

Essential baby boomer reading!

My review of The Left Bank, and Other Stories by Jean Rhys

The Left Bank, and Other Stories

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

A must for all Jean Rhys aficionados. This was her first ever published writing, which came about by chance and desperation. Those who read her posthumously published unfinished autobiography Smile Please will know that the story behind these Left Bank stories is a great one:

In 1924 Ella Lenglet nee Williams (later Jean Rhys) was alone, destitute and starving in a run down Paris hotel room. Her husband of five years, French-Dutch journalist and songwriter (and spy) Jean Lenglet, was in a French jail for what she described as 'currency irregularities'.

After visiting him one day, she took articles he had written to a newspaper contact to try and sell, so she could eat. The newspaper contact sent her on to someone else who asked her to go away and translate them, which, being multilingual, she successfully did. That contact finally declined her husband's translated articles but liked her translation style and so, as a final thought, asked her whether she, Ella, had ever penned anything herself.

Perplexed but desperate, she showed the person some samples of her diary, which including a few rough sketches of life in the Paris she inhabited.

So impressive were these that the rapidly thinning Ella was sent on to another contact, eventually coming face to face with English writer and publisher Ford Maddox Ford.

He was instantly impressed and took her under his wing, mentoring her and inviting her to move in with him and his common-law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen. Under Ford's tutelage her stories were developed into The Left Bank, and Other Stories and published in his Transatlantic Review.

It was with this release of her first published fiction that Ford persuaded her to use nom de plume Jean Rhys.

Ford published a generous introductory foreword, praising her 'singular instinct for form,' for which she became so loved by her readers many decades on. 'Coming from the West Indies,' Ford explained here, 'with a terrifying insight and ... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World.'

Such was the advent of Jean Rhys' unlikely writing career.

It was also during this period, while living with Ford & Stella, that Jean's turbulent affair with Ford took place under Stella's nose, resulting the breakup of Jean's marriage to her jailed husband - all to be later fictionalised into what would become the first Jean Rhys novel, Quartet (1928). But that cathartic act of vengeance is another story.

So, these Stories From The Left Bank have quite a tale of their own.

These preliminary short stories that made young Ella Williams history and launched newly invented Jean Rhys are filled with her personal hallmarks: her vivid characterisations, her evocative, filmic scenes, her succinct, incisive take on life through the eyes of the downtrodden, of the outsider looking in.

Breathtaking. Not to be passed over by any of her readers.

(NB A selection of these are also included in Jean's Tigers Are Better Looking anthology).

My review of I'll Cry Tomorrow by Lillian Roth, Gerold Frank, Mike Connolly

I'll Cry Tomorrow

by Lillian Roth, Gerold Frank, Mike Connolly

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Riveting 1954 memoir of 1920s & '30s star of stage, screen and radio, Lillian Roth.

Her horrific journey through alcoholism, making for confronting reading at times, was an unprecedented international sensation. Courageously penned, this became a global best seller of its era, in seven languages.

She was widely praised for passing on the message of recovery to millions in an era when alcoholism was seldom discussed in polite society. She was also harshly criticised by certain overly zealous self-appointed Twelve Step fellowship spokespeople wary of celebrities making themselves 'recovery' icons (some who disclosed their fellowship membership were accused of damaging 'the program's' reputation when they publicly relapsed).

Recovery controversies aside, this was, and remains, a brilliant standalone book, not at all the sort of tacky celeb tell-all that would evolve in subsequent years.

At six, as Educational Pictures' trademark, Lillian was painted as a living statue holding a lamp of knowledge, and her painter molested her, which she describes in chilling detail as the defining event that would forever haunt her.

Lillian's signature song was "When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along)". That's about the best-known legacy many of today's generations may have of her. And this hair-raising book.

Actresses in considered to play Lillian in the 1955 film adaptation included June Allyson, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Jane Wyman, Jean Simmons, Jane Russell and Piper Laurie. It was Susan Hayward who won the role and was nominated for an Academy Award for her gritty portrayal. That movie became the fourth-highest money maker of 1956.

Still an awesome read more than 50 years after its publication, this candid memoir gave me cold shivers, goose pimples and left me wanting to read more and more when I'd finished the last page.

My review of Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh by Alexander Walker.

Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh

by Alexander Walker

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It was on reflection of what would have been Vivien Leigh's hundred and tenth year, 2023, that I revisited Alexander Walker's biography, one I had previously relished, but which had triggered disappointment in some. I've said before: if it's a movieography you want, click on Wikipedia or the Internet Movie Database. There isn't much to see. Leigh didn't make a long list of films comparable to other legends of her standing. This serious actress was at heart a great theatre performer, like her husband Sir Laurence Olivier who, likewise, made some celluloid epics but less than you might think.

So obviously this is no beginners' handbook on Vivien Leigh's movies. It's hardly news that she won two Best Actress Academy Awards for her performances as 'Southern belles': Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had played on stage in London's West End in 1949. Unsurprisingly, she also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway version of Tovarich (1963).

This biography is about the person more than her films. Like many extraordinary talents, Leigh lived with bipolar disorder, no easy thing for any sufferer to work with let alone a star of stage and screen with those impossibly demanding schedules. This affected her twenty-year marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier so much that it ended in heartbreak, Olivier taking up with now great Joan Plowright who became the Lady Olivier we know today.

This multi-award nominee and winner of Oscars, New York Film Critics, Golden Globes and Tonies struggled with major health issues beside her mental ones. Her life and career were marred by those episodes. Recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s, claimed her life at 53. Understandably, she had earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, her career suffering periods of inactivity.

She was born in India, daughter of an English army officer in the Indian Cavalry. The family returned to their native England, Vivien later attending London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She cut short her studies to get engaged to a man who disapproved of theatre work. She had therefore already been married, had a daughter and separated before she resumed her career, doing numerous quality but low-profile acting jobs for several years as she honed her stagecraft.

Then along came Olivier, her great love, and in turn came her brilliant career. Olivier really was her life more than anything, hence this biography's pronounced emphasis on her private life. She was utterly devastated by her divorce and never recovered.

The reader wonders whether it might have been some small consolation to Vivien being posthumously ranked 16th greatest female movie star of all time, in 1999, by the American Film Institute.

A more tragic private figure than any she publicly portrayed, here was a soul we feel for yet celebrate as we work our way through her life, care of this ever-reliable biographer of screen goddesses. I could not help wondering, on my second reading, whether a hundred-and-one-year-old Ms. Leigh might have eventually driven out her demons and made peace with her life, time healing all things and wisdom a natural product of years passing. She would surely have become one mightily wise dame. But as with all the great tragediennes, her life was cut short in her prime, which was perhaps her ultimate preference. She was, after all, quoted by US journalist Radie Harris as confiding that she 'would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him'. Once more, I finished this book hoping this great star and tortured soul is at peace, if not for having kept her great love in life, then in the compensatory assurance of how treasured she will always be by her fans.

My review of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title. 

After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also feared that by reading this I may be disappointed discovering that her fiction was not, after all, dressed up (or down) fragments her own life. 

Such was the dilemma underlying my prevarication in reading this, a slow self-torture not unlike Jean's own which I knew so intimately from her stories. When I mustered the courage to read this it was the milestone I hoped it would be. 

Yes, Jean's fictional books were distinguishable here in her real life. But thankfully, as the saying goes, 'truth is always stranger than fiction'. So I was saved, my dilemma redundant. 

I had a reticence that this felt intrusive, like rummaging through her drawers when she had gone. However, I consoled myself, she would not have disclosed here what she chose not to, nobody was forcing her to say anything. My mother once said, 'I taught you everything you know ... but not everything I know!' Here was my favourite writer inferring likewise with those deliciously pregnant narrative gaps. 

As devotees and biographers have noted, Jean bared her soul in her writing but kept some to herself. I was relieved she did likewise here, retained some small, precious dignity after the literary world had bellowed at her, in her dotage, for forever baring her most intimate truths veiled in gossamer thin fiction. 

Many have concurred it was not just what Jean wrote that was so brilliant: it was what she did not write, those gaps left for the reader's mind to fill. Indeed, one biographer who researched her old drafts revealed that Jean always underwent a severe, almost self-lacerating editing process, originally taught her by ex-lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford. Here she does it one final time as she grinningly waves us farewell, leaving us longing to know what else happened in between these episodes she so tantalisingly punctuates. 

In this Jean includes her first poem, penned the first time her adolescent heart broke. It comprises three simple words written three consecutive times: 'I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.' 

I will not desist revisiting her works whenever I get those Jean Rhys blues. That would be unthinkable. I need to know her words await me. 

This, her last word, was not for this fan the end of Jean Rhys, not something that left me with any disloyal finality or closure on her. Rather, it confirmed that I should start over and read her books from scratch. Again. And again. And again.