cover image The Churchill Sisters: The Extraordinary Loves of Winston and Clementine’s Daughters

The Churchill Sisters: The Extraordinary Loves of Winston and Clementine’s Daughters

Rachel Trethewey. St. Martin’s, $29.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-27239-3

Journalist Trethewey (Before Wallis) delivers a breezy group biography of Winston Churchill’s surviving daughters Diana, Sarah, and Mary (Marigold, born in 1918, died of septicemia at age two). The girls’ mother, Clementine, took frequent vacations away from the family to guard her mental health, and as children they joined their father at political events and on the campaign trail. During WWII, they all took active roles in the war effort, as was expected of the prime minister’s daughters. Sarah, recently separated from her first husband, left her stage career to sign on with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and accompanied her father to conferences with Allied leaders at Tehran and Yalta. Meanwhile, Diana, who was married to her second husband and raising children, served as an air-raid warden and worked in a munitions factory. After the war, she divorced again and struggled with mental health issues before dying by suicide in 1963. Mary, the “stable sister,” actively supported her politician husband’s career and raised five children. Trethewey’s less-than-robust historical context offers little insight on the sisters’ political influence on their father and the nation, but she sets a brisk pace and succeeds in depicting a trio of intriguing women at a perilous moment in world affairs. Women’s history buffs will be entertained. Illus. (Nov.)