Jennie Churchill
Morning Lecture
19 October 2022
Sepia Photograph of Jennie Churchill
Jennie Churchill has been treated unfairly in history as merely a woman with 200 lovers, but in the 21st century, a centenary after Jennie’s tragically premature death in 1921, now is surely the time to re-evaluate her legacy.
In 1874, aged 20, American-born Jeanette Jerome, known as Jennie, married Lord Randolph Churchill. When this ended in disaster she threw all her energies into her son Winston - her number one creative project. However, she had no income in an age when women were not expected to earn a living, so indulged in various loss making projects including writing plays, editing magazines and supporting literary charities until becoming an interior designer (before the term was invented) finally earned her money.
Jennie's belief in her son's destiny is what helped him become The Greatest Briton. In this lecture Anne Sebba explains why Jennie was so important for her son's success.
Our Speaker Anne Sebba is a biographer, historian and award winning author of eleven books, who lectures to a variety of audiences in the US and UK, including the English Speaking Union, Royal Over-Seas League, National Trust, British Library, Imperial War Museum and on several cruises, as well as to The Arts Society.
A former Reuters foreign correspondent, Anne is now a broadcaster who has presented documentaries for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and regularly appears on television talking about her books, mostly biographies including Jennie Churchill, William Bankes, Laura Ashley and Wallis Simpson. The latter, published as That Woman, was an international bestseller and was followed in 2016 by a history of Paris between 1939-49 through women's eyes entitled Les Parisiennes, How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, winner of the Franco British book prize for 2016. Her latest book is Ethel Rosenberg A Cold War Tragedy (published 2021).
Anne is a former chair of Britain's 10,000 strong Society of Authors, a Senior Research Fellow at The Institute of Historical Research and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). In 2023 she was selected as a judge on the inaugural Women's Prize for Non Fiction.
Anne Sebba