The Viceroy's Daughters by Anne de Courcy

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. At the end of their extraordinary lives, Irene and Baba have become, rather improbably, pillars of the establishment, Irene being made one of the very first Life Peers in 1958 for her work with youth clubs. The war finds them based at 'the Dorch' (the Dorchester Hotel) doing good works. The sisters see British fascism from behind the scenes, and the arrival of Wallis Simpson and the early married life of the Windsors. On Cimmie's early death in 1933 Baba flung herself into a long and passionate affair with Mosley and a liaison with Mussolini's ambassador to London, Count Dino Grandi, while enjoying the romantic devotion of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Alexandra ('Baba'), the youngest and most beautiful, married the Prince of Wales's best friend Fruity Metcalfe. Cynthia ('Cimmie') married Oswald Mosley, joining him first in the Labour Party, where she became a popular MP herself, before following him into fascism. Irene, intensely musical and a passionate foxhunter, had love affairs in the glamorous Melton Mowbray hunting set. The three sisters were at the very heart of the fast and glittering world of the Twenties and Thirties. Irene (born 1896), Cynthia (b.1898) and Alexandria (b.1904) were the three daughters of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898-1905 and probably the grandest and most self-confident imperial servant Britain ever possessed.Īfter the death of his fabulously rich American wife in 1906, Curzon's determination to control every aspect of his daughters' lives, including the money that was rightfully theirs, led them one by one into revolt against their father. The lives of the three daughters of Lord Curzon: glamorous, rich, independent and wilful.

The Viceroy's Daughters by Anne de Courcy