In 1931, Nancy Astor, owner of one of the most expensive houses in England, accompanied George Bernard Shaw to the Soviet Union. Armed with enough tinned food for two weeks, she embarked on the trip with the entitled confidence of the English aristocracy, though she was an American by birth. “When will you stop killing people?” she asked Stalin, who’d granted her a two-hour interview. “We are living in a state of war,” he replied. “When peace comes we shall stop it.”
With sufficient wealth and privilege, English women could be anywhere and talk to anyone. Siân Evans’s new book is an account of six English hostesses (three originally American and one Scottish) who flourished in the interwar years. Nancy Astor, Mrs Laura Corrigan, Sibyl, Lady Colefax, Lady Emerald Cunard, Lady Londonderry and Mrs Margaret Greville all lived in houses that are difficult to conceive of as domestic residences now, when most of them are owned by the National Trust. The grandest was Cliveden, the Astors’ Buckinghamshire home, where at the end of Nancy’s life the Profumo affair began.
For Evans, this is more than an escapist tale of privilege. She claims both that “to be a great hostess was a career choice for those resourceful and energetic women” and that her six “queen bees” had “profound effects on British history”. Neither claim is convincing. Being a great hostess is not a career choice and it demeans the pioneering women who did manage to have jobs in this period to call it one. Indeed, some of these hostesses also had careers, which took up more time than their hostessing.
When her husband inherited a title and was debarred from his political seat in 1919, Nancy Astor stood for election. As the first female MP to take her seat, she managed to weather male disapprobation and to influence the law, pushing through an act in 1923 banning the sale of alcohol to those under 18. “When you took your seat, I felt as if a woman had come into my bathroom and I had only a sponge with which to defend myself,” Churchill complained. “You are not handsome enough to have worries of that kind,” Astor retorted. Meanwhile, Sibyl Colefax set up a successful interior-decorating business, starting her 12-hour days at 7am so that she could finish in time for the daily round of drinks and dinner, changing her clothes in the back of her chauffeur-driven Rolls on the way.
Did these women have much influence as hostesses? Certainly between them they managed to entice most of the social, political and artistic elite to their competing salons. But ultimately, this was a series of parties. Reminiscing about Emerald Cunard, Oswald Mosley looked back on her house as a place where “the cleverest met with the most beautiful and that is what social life should be”. No doubt it was all “enormous fun”, as he recalled, but surely Astor had more influence as an MP than she did at home. The suggestion that they influenced art also seems overstated. Though their houses were popular, they were not especially respected by serious writers and artists. Mocking Colefax, Virginia Woolf coined the term “Colefaxismus” for casual remarks intended to imply privileged knowledge of a subject. Emerald Cunard’s influence in the opera scene was acquired chiefly as a result of the financial support she gave her lover, the conductor Thomas Beecham. But this was an increasingly humiliating affair with a serially unfaithful man.
Most of them lost face in the lead up to the second world war, when all but one were sympathetic to Hitler. The Londonderrys made their final visit to Germany in June 1938 and insisted afterwards that Britain should “extend the hand of true friendship to the Third Reich” for the sake of world peace. The hostesses did their best to regain prestige by aiding the war effort and some were impressive in their sacrifices and achievements. Laura Corrigan remained in Paris once it was overrun by Nazis, managing to sell her jewellery to Goering in order to support wounded soldiers in France.
There are important historical questions to be asked here, but Evans is too anxious to defend her subjects to scrutinise their place in history. She also doesn’t seem especially interested in analysing her cast as individuals. The portraits are done with a broad brush and I found that I didn’t know these women intimately enough to care what happened to them and was frequently inclined to agree with Harold Nicolson, complaining that “the harm which these silly, selfish hostesses do is immense”. Nicolson didn’t turn down their invitations, though, and I didn’t stop reading about them. Insofar as it’s always pleasurable to read about the quirks and feats of eccentric and redoubtable women, the book, like their parties, is often “enormous fun”.
Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich. Queen Bees is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40
