1) Yesterday afternoon I was in the throes of a putrid headache when the doorbell rang. There was no one there, but a package had been left - addressed to me! An old colleague from the Pastel Prison had returned by post The Lady and the Law: The Remarkable Story of Fanny Holtzman, the remarkable biography of not just one of the great women lawyers of the 20th century, one of the great lawyers regardless of gender. Forgotten today, I’d first heard of her reading about Gertrude Lawrence (barely remembered as the creator of Anna in The King and I and Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives), whose lawyer she was. Litigating for Princess Irina Yusupov against MGM in the 1930s, she famously said “I don’t follow precedents, I set ‘em.” And gosh darn it, she did!
1a) The thrill of pleasure getting to reread my favorite anecdote in the book, about Fanny’s first luncheon with Princess Irina’s mother, Grand Duchess Xenia, at Frogmore Cottage. The grand duchess asked how she should address Fanny. “After all, you’re a famous barrister.” “No, I’m not. I’m an American lawyer. Call me Fanny. But what am I supposed to call you? I suppose it can’t be Mrs. Romanoff?” Flickering only a hair’s breadth, the grand duchess replied “Call me Xenia.” Much later did Fanny find out that only King George V and a few family members were ever allowed to call her by her name.
2) Today, inexplicably, another book came in the mail, Music at Midnight by Muriel Draper. I’ve never heard of the author, but I sure do know the sender well: my cousin Alice. This book had been her mother’s, my beloved cousin Audrey, and I know I’m going to enjoy it.
2a) The subtitle, “Memories of a World That Has Passed,” evokes a lot for me right now, not just my world that has passed, but the world that passed before I got here, and which I miss without having gotten to experience it.
3) Such as what I’ve been reading about in the third book, which I bought in New York, Those Wild Wyndhams by Claudia Renton. Famously painted by John Singer Sargent, there’s an awful lot of unpack here! Mary, the eldest (who became Lady Elcho when she married Hugo, and then Countess of Weemys (sp?) when Hugo inherited), was a charter member of The Souls and the longtime confidante and possible spanking (!) partner of Arthur Balfour. Later she also had an affair with and gave birth to the child of Wilfrid Blunt, who had had an affair with her mother many years before. Madeline, known as Mananai (who married Charles Adeane), married for love and seems to have had a blameless life. Pamela, the youngest, married Eddie Tennant (later Baron Glenconner) and ended up with that wicked Margot Asquith as a sister-in-law. Pamela was rather a raving egomaniac, but also a writer of some talent. Her second husband was the former Foreign Secretary Edward Grey. And her youngest son Stephen was one of the most outrageous, beautiful, and very very gay Bright Young Things.
3a) There’s just so much going on this book - it’s fascinating, but also poignant. So many of their young male relatives died in battle during World War I, for instance. But I can barely put it down.