CLARISSA: The revelatory biography of Clarissa Eden, wife of Anthony Eden, from 'the most knowledgeable royal biographer on the planet' - FINANCIAL TIMES

by Hugo Vickers

Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, wife of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, once famously 'For the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room.'

With her impressive intellect and acerbic wit, she was a highly influential muse to many leading figures over several decades.

At Oxford in the 1940s she fascinated dons and undergraduates alike. She went on to work in the film world for Alexander Korda and for George Weidenfeld at Contact Magazine. She was a close friend of Cecil Beaton, James Pope-Hennessy, Lucian Freud, Isaiah Berlin, and Lord Goodman. She fascinated Greta Garbo.

After an early Bohemian life, she became a politically active wife to Eden when he was Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, particularly during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Her death at 101 in 2021 has opened the way for this enthralling and revealing biography by the widely admired biographer Hugo Vickers. He knew her well for over 40 years, and consigned her revealing private papers and sharply written diaries to him.

Here also are first hand contributions from friends such as Antonia Fraser. Clarissa Eden's story sheds invaluable light on a rapidly vanishing age and an extraordinary woman.

444 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 21, 2024

About the author

Hugo Vickers is a writer and broadcaster, who has written biographies of many twentieth century figures, including the Queen Mother, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, a study of Greta Garbo, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece, and his book, The Private World of The Duke and Duchess of Windsor was illustrated with pictures from their own collection. Mr Vickers’s book, The Kiss: The Story of an Obsession won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction.

Reviews

[Diana Cheal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not Vickers’ usual standard. Quite light on detail and more about the people she knew rather than her time, I felt, and her thoughts.

[Jim Bowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the biggest catastrophes of British post WWII foreign policy was our attempt to retake the Suez Canal (with the French), after the Egyptian President nationalised it. The Prime Minister at the time was Anthony Eden, this book is about his second wife, Clarissa.

Clarissa Eden was born into an upper class, monied family (she was the niece of Winston Churchill), and did all the standard upper class, monied things you might expect of a Churchill raised in the pre-war period. She did debutante balls, a little light journalism about upper classed things, without the formal education that would go with that position now. She was intelligent, and could have gone to university, had it been a thing then, but it wasn't, so she didn't.

The problem is that I'm not sure she's particularly likeable. Pretty? Sure, for that time, I see it, but she was standoffish, to say the least, a little condescending, and the epitome of her class, which I came to decide I didn't like.

Add the fact that the book doesn't really tell us much about Suez, and I'm left feeling a bit dubious about the book. Admittedly she's wasn't directly involved (she wasn't an elected MP, so no surprise there), but she wasn't directly involved, so she can't really let us know about things.

What she did say was the fact that her husband is typically described as ill, tired, emotional, and on drugs, during the crisis, Clarissa said that he got very ill, and emotional afterwards, but at the time he was thinking clearly, he was just wrong.