The American Adventuress
In this fictional biography of Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, C. W. Gortner serves up a lively and engrossing portrait of an unconventional woman who never stopped turning heads.
The novel opens with Jennie at school in New York. A natural rebel, she’s looking out the window for her father instead of attending to class. This neatly sets the scene for the following 55 years of her life, encompassing births, deaths, marriages and divorces, wartime and peace. Throughout, Jennie’s voice warmly invites the reader into all her concerns, almost as if she were telling her story over a cup of tea. From New York to Paris and London to Blenheim, Jennie remains true to her own character, taking lovers and facing down her mother-in-law when she finds her beloved son Winston has been caned at boarding school. In one of many remarkable parts of her life story, she spends her 46th birthday on a ship to South Africa, taking nurses and hospital supplies to care for soldiers injured in the Boer War.
As fashionable and vain as she is resilient and kind, it’s a pleasure to travel through half a century of history with Jennie Jerome. Gortner’s admirable ability to evoke events and weave period details seamlessly into his story is on full display here. Although readers may take up the book because of her famous son, this remains very much Churchill’s mother’s story.
