Portrait of a lady

Clarissa Eden’s father was the younger brother of Winston Churchill. Her mother was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon. She was born into an upper-class society which still, as in Trollope’s novels, was organised to bring daughters into contact with eligible husbands at summer balls. A beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes, she would have triumphed as a debutante. But she soon got bored with the social rituals of the season; ‘one dance,’ she wrote, ‘was very much like another’. Always independent-minded, Clarissa struck out on her own and sought her chosen friends among artists and writers. She attended Ben Nicolson’s parties where a drunken Philip Toynbee sang communist songs. To the astonishment of her friends, in 1952 she married Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary in Churchill’s government formed in 1951. This opened what she calls the ‘second phase of my life’. Thus her memoirs fall into two distinct parts.