cover image Lifespan: An Autobiography

Lifespan: An Autobiography

Audrey Withers. Peter Owen Publishers, $31.95 (216pp) ISBN 978-0-7206-0927-1

Withers was the editor of the British edition of Vogue from 1940 to 1960. Here she details her successful career in the fashion world as well as her life after retirement. Withers's stilted writing is enlivened by her descriptions of work-related encounters with such personalities as Lord Snowdon (a Vogue photographer who was married to Princess Margaret), Greta Garbo and cosmetics executive Helena Rubinstein. The author left her first husband to marry Victor Kennett, a Russian emigre and photographer. They traveled to the Soviet Union, where Kennett took the pictures for his wife's 1973 book, Palaces of Leningrad. Withers also wrote the text for a catalogue, edited by Jacqueline Onassis, for an exhibit of Russian costumes at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of interest to literary historians will be the relationship and letters, some excerpted here, between the author's father, Percy Withers, and poet A.E. Housman. Photos. (Jan.)