Lady Mary Clive
Lady Mary Katherine Clive (.
Life
Born into the
She and her siblings had few friends outside of her immediate family, a fact that she attributed to the out-of-date clothes that they wore as children.[1] Lady Mary said that perhaps her mother had not "noticed that children's fashions had changed and as we grew older, we became acutely aware of the eccentricity of our appearance...summer and winter alike, we had to wear brown, ribbed woolen stockings and brown boots, which were a nuisance all the year round...worse still was the shame of them, which ate into our very souls."[1] Of her 1964 memoir The Day of Reckoning, the Daily Telegraph said that she wrote "with the acuteness of observation and lack of sentimentality that characterised her own personality."[2]
The Guardian said that "Mary, like her brothers and sisters, [had] a fierce independence of spirit and a positive relish for being different."[1] Her childhood Christmases were spent at her mother's ancestral home of Middleton Park in Oxfordshire, and she recalled these in her 1955 novel Christmas with the Savages.[2]
Lady Mary married Meysey Clive, a soldier and
Lady Mary was a sister-in-law of the historian and biographer Elizabeth Longford, with whom she would travel as they were researching books. Clive would assist her in recognising historic battlefields in Spain and Portugal when she was researching the life of the Duke of Wellington.[1]
Career
She was presented as a debutante in 1926, an experience that she described in her memoir Brought Up and Brought Out (1938), that focused on the darker side of life as a debutante.[1][3] She described 1926 as a 'bumper dowdy year' for debutantes, and the men she was introduced to as 'practically deformed...Some were without chins. Some had no foreheads. Hardly any of them had backs to their heads.'[3] She also advertised Pond's cold cream during her time as a debutante.[2]
The 1926 United Kingdom general strike occurred the same year, and she served tea to striking lorry drivers.[3] Her intelligence was considered a handicap for a debutante, so Lady Mary had to 'palm herself off as a low-brow'.[3] Lady Mary spent three seasons as a debutante and then resolved to get a job, lodging in Chelsea for almost five years.[2] In 1931 she embarked on a trip around the world, beginning in Canada in a luxury hotel and ending on a sheep station in New Zealand. She later went on a secret solo bicycle trip across France and Switzerland.[2]
Lady Mary took a secretarial course, and worked for a writer who praised free love; however she found work insufficiently rewarding and then resolved not to work again unless she was extremely well paid.[2] As an art student she studied in London, Rome, and Munich, and on her return shared a studio in Chelsea where her younger sister Violet would pose nude for her.[2]
As a
Lady Mary wrote two historical biographies, of
Bibliography
- Memoir
- Brought Up and Brought Out (1938)
- Christmas with the Savages (1955)
- The Day of Reckoning (1964)
- History
- John Donne – Jack and the Doctor (1966)
- Edward IV of England– This Sun of York (1973)
- Novels as Hans Duffy
- In England Now (1932)
- Seven by Seven (1933)
- Lucasta's Wedding (1936)
- Under the Sugar-Plum Tree (1937)
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Peter Stanford (22 April 2010). "Lady Mary Clive Obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Obituary – Lady Mary Clive". The Daily Telegraph. 26 March 2010. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Harry Mount (8 August 2007). "The irony and the ecstasy of Lady Mary Clive". The Spectator. Archived from the original on 1 September 2013. Retrieved 1 September 2013.