Cover image of "Lady Clementine," a biographical novel about Winston Churchill's wife

Most accounts of World War II show Winston Churchill facing off alone against Adolf Hitler as he rallied the British people to unprecedented heights of heroism. But “Winston wasn’t alone during World War II—even though he’s always pictured that way.” As Marie Benedict shows in her novel, Lady Clementine, Winston Churchill’s wife, née Clementine Hozier, “was standing by his side all along, guiding him in his decision-making, influencing governmental leaders toward their shared goals, helping him navigate the tricky landscape of colleagues and staff, raising their children, and ensuring his well-being.” And, perhaps more surprising, editing the speeches we remember so well. The book is a revelation.

Lady Clementine Churchill defied the conventions of the era

Baroness Clementine Spencer-Churchill (1885-1977) was born into an unhappy aristocratic family. From an early age, she rebelled against the constraints of the time. As a young adult, she shocked her contemporaries, speaking openly about politics and world affairs. Women didn’t do that in the Victorian era. Then, at age 22 she met Winston at a dinner party. He was a decade older. The rising young politician was about to join the cabinet.

“I examined this man,” Benedict writes in Clementine’s voice, “over a decade my senior and an important, if controversial, member of Parliament, and saw the sensitive person who lay beneath the blunderbuss of his exterior, one who understood and shared my sense of being different.” And for Winston, the attraction was powerful, too. They were married a few months later.

Clementine and Winston’s marriage, which lasted nearly 60 years, was a true partnership for much of that time—most notably during the two world wars. Then, she defied all expectations of her role as a political wife by appearing in public, even sometimes joining Winston at dinners and meetings with officials in his government and occasionally speaking in his stead. This just wasn’t done, even in the 1940s.

Lady Clementine by Marie Benedict (2020) 402 pages ★★★★☆

Photo of Winston Churchill with his wife, Clementine
Winston and Clementine Churchill campaigning unsuccessfully for his reelection in 1945 after V-E Day. Image: Richard M. Longworth

A revealing biopic in print

Benedict’s biographical novel spans the years from the couple’s meeting in 2008 to the summer of 1945, following V-E Day. She writes in the first person from Clementine Churchill’s perspective. Over the years, beloved family members marry and remarry, die of disease or fall in war, and Clementine gives birth to five children. Meanwhile, her relationship with her husband, always loving but frequently strained, rides a roller-coaster of emotion. As Benedict tells the story, the most severe differences between them arise over Winston’s indulgence of their spoiled son, Randolph, a serial philanderer, gambling addict, and abusive husband to the future Pamela Harrington. Clementine, herself an indifferent mother at best, had contributed to Randolph’s misbehavior by leaving him and his two oldest sisters in the care of a series of young and often incompetent nannies.

An evolving relationship

Family troubles aside, Benedict’s novel dwells at greatest length on the two periods when Winston holds the fate of the nation in his hands, originally as First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I and later as Prime Minister during World War II. But she emphasizes the cooling of the couple’s relationship when Winston rejoins the Conservative Party in 1924 to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. His adherence to the party’s right-wing policies angers and disappoints her. The attraction she’d felt for him 16 years earlier rested to some degree on their shared belief in the social welfare policies of the Liberal Party. (Winston remained a Conservative for the rest of his life.) But she is also aghast at his stubborn and outspoken resistance to granting home rule for India.

Winston and Clementine fight at times. But she devotes so much energy, physical and emotional, to tending to his needs that from time to time she succumbs to nervous exhaustion. On more than one occasion she absents herself from him and the children to recuperate for weeks or even months.

Omissions in the story

Benedict researched this book, but not thoroughly. For example, during the World War I years, she treats the Gallipoli disaster to the attention it deserves but overlooks what to Winston would have been equally important: his lonely advocacy for building super dreadnought battleships with then-unprecedented 15-inch guns. Britain built five, and they played a central role in keeping Germany’s surface fleet bottled up in the Baltic. And during World War II, Benedict shows how Clementine helped host and charm the three American emissaries—Harry Hopkins, Ambassador Gil Winant, and Averell Harriman—whom President Roosevelt sent to assess Britain’s ability to survive the Nazi onslaught.

Doubtless, Clementine did play a major role in persuading these three influential Americans to support Britain’s lonely resistance to the Nazis. But another, younger woman proved to be at least equally important in the effort: the former Pamela Digby, who married Randolph Churchill and became as close a personal advisor to Winston as Clementine during the crucial early years of World War II. Benedict doesn’t so much as mention P.amela Churchill’s role as advisor to the Prime Minister.

But a third omission is more serious. During the 1930s, when he was out of office, Winston briefly conducted an affair with a young British socialite named Lady Doris Castlerosse. The affair came to light in a documentary released in 2016. He ended the affair as war threatened and his career revived. Surely, this extended a episode merits mention in a biographical novel of the man’s wife, even if she was ignorant of the relationship. It’s true enough that some of Winston’s partisans deny the affair ever happened. But the evidence convinced the professionals at the Guardian, and that’s good enough for me.

About the author

Photo of Marie Benedict, author of this novel about Cover image of "Lady Clementine," a biographical novel about Winston Churchill's wife
Marie Benedict. Image: A. Musmanno – NEXTpittsburgh

Marie Benedict is the pen name of Heather Benedict Terrell. She is both an attorney and the author of 17 novels to date, seven of them written under her own name. Terrell studied history and art history at Boston College, then gained a law degree from Boston University School of Law. She has been writing full-time since 2008, when she left the practice of law as a litigator. Terrell was born in 1968 and raised in Pittsburgh, where she now lives with her husband Jim Terrell and their two children.

I’ve reviewed two of the author’s other novels, both of which I enjoyed immensely:

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