Women of Quality

E.S. Turner

• The Pebbled Shore by Elizabeth Longford
  Weidenfeld, 351 pp, £14.95, August 1986, ISBN 0 297 78863 9
• Leaves of the Tulip Tree by Juliette Huxley
  Murray, 248 pp, £7.95, June 1986, ISBN 0 7195 4288 X
• Enid Bagnold by Anne Sebba
  Weidenfeld, 317 pp, £15.00, September 1986, ISBN 0 297 78991 0

Wider still and wider grows the span of authors’ acknowledgements. My forbearing husband/wife, my secretary who corrected my spelling, my patient editor and Lord Weidenfeld Whose Idea it Was – these we have grown to expect and honour. Elizabeth Longford, now in her eighties, thanks two family doctors who ‘made life so secure for us’ (and who themselves survived to 90 and 86). She is grateful to one son-in-law for ‘introducing me to the perfect diet during a critical time in the writing of this book’ and to another for a stimulating holiday in the sun: ‘It was an exhilarating experience to listen to the Pinters’ and Billingtons’ play-reading sessions, interlaced with passionate talk about Amnesty and Star Wars under the stars.’ She is grateful, too, for the custom of ‘manuscript bartering’ prevalent in the family, on the basis of ‘I’ll read yours if you’ll read and criticise mine.’ All of which is a foretaste of the warm family feeling which pervades this chronicle of politics and parturition (babies are born to the author on pages 143, 149, 179, 204, 211, 217, 239 and 252).