58 pages • 1 hour read
Marie BenedictLady Clementine
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
September 12, 1908
London, England
Chapter 1 opens with Clementine Churchill describing herself as an “outsider” on the morning of her wedding. Staying at Lady St. Helier’s house, Clementine wakes up early and encounters Mary, a maid, who helps Clementine disguise herself. After she changes in the pantry, Clementine catches a bus to her mother’s house. Questioned by the bus driver who recognizes her from the newspapers, Clementine knocks on the door and sees Nellie, her sister. Shocked, Nellie asks why Clementine has arrived on her wedding day.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
September 12, 1908
London, England
Over tea, Nellie questions Clementine about calling off the wedding. Reassuring her sister that she will marry later in the day, Clementine touches her sister’s hand, remembering the needlework they used to do together to make ends meet. Clementine claims that she needs to settle her nerves. She recalls their elder sister Kitty, who died at 16, with Nellie and Nellie’s twin brother Bill. Clementine describes her first meeting with Winston Churchill at Lady Helier’s. Clementine had to borrow the appropriate clothes and white gloves from her sister and mother to attend a formal dinner with her patroness. Clementine was late and Winston was even later, and the butler sat them together. Winston and Clementine chatted about her French tutoring, their appreciation of French culture, and William’s unpopularity in some households; William is a member of parliament who supported the suffrage bill, a cause that Clementine also supports.
Returning to the present, Clementine laughs with her brother and sister until their mother enters. Shocked by Clementine’s arrival, Lady Blanche Hozier asks why Clementine has visited in the early morning. Clementine disarms her mother with a witty reply, and then her mother instructs Clementine to return to Lady St. Helier’s to prepare for her wedding.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
September 12, 1908
London, England
Lady St. Helier’s maid fixes Clementine’s hair before her wedding, as Clementine notes that her mother’s bohemian choices have reduced the family to a genteel poverty. She will now be able to afford maids after marrying Winston, although Clementine decides that’s a waste.
Recalling their proposal, Clementine remembers Winston’s repeated invitations that summer to visit Blenheim Palace, the only non-royal or episcopal residence called a palace in England. Clementine finally accepted the invitation, despite lacking the necessary formal clothing. Clementine reflects kindly on their shared letters and their idealistic perspectives. Clementine notes to herself that she and Winston both have unhappy homes: Winston’s father dislikes him and Clementine’s mother ignores her emotionally.
As her train approaches Blenheim, Clementine again recalls her anxieties. Winston and the Duke are cousins. At the palace, Winston’s family, minus his brother Jack and new wife Gwendeline, greet Clementine, and she’s given a tour. After dinner that night, Winston apologizes to Clementine for discussing politics and business, but she offers an assessment of his ideas, surprising him. He offers to show her the rose garden the next morning, but he oversleeps and angers Clementine. He meets her later in the day, giving her the tour he promised. As he regales her with Blenheim’s history, Winston tells her that his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, rescued the house from disrepair. Clementine thinks to herself that the fortune of the Duke’s estranged wife—American Consuelo Vanderbilt—made that possible. As a storm approaches, the two return to the palace. The rain begins to pour and the two find shelter in a small Greek-style temple in the garden. Winston proposes to Clementine.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
September 12, 1908
London, England
Chapter 4 returns to the present and the day of Clementine’s wedding. She arrives at St. Margaret’s, a 16th-century edifice erected between Westminster Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament, where her brother walks her down the aisle. She notes the many faces she sees in the crowd, including her mother, who is seated next to her sister’s husband and Clementine’s alleged father.
Thinking that her mother will not spoil her wedding day, Clementine sees another reminder of possible anxiety as she glances at her cousin Venetia. Venetia’s friend, Violet Asquith, has missed the wedding, but continues to chase Winston. Two days earlier, Violet wrote Venetia lambasting Clementine and then disappeared for hours, before being found with no apparent injuries after an extensive search of the grounds. Clementine notes to herself that these antics are meant to upstage her own wedding.
As the bishop marries Winston and Clementine, he interrupts the service to chat with Winston, his former student, as Clementine sees a picture of Elizabeth I, thinking that the queen would not have suffered this delay. In her mind, Clementine challenges how the bishop characterizes her as a support for her husband in their vows. She vows to act differently in their marriage.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
October 14, 1908
London, England
Returning from their honeymoon in Italy, Clementine recounts their happy times together. Clementine and Winston have divulged more of their pasts and the neglect that Winston experienced. Clementine confesses that they had consummated their marriage and gave each other pet names: “Pug” for Winston and “Cat” for Clementine.
As they approach his home at 12 Bolton Street in London, Winston asks if he should carry her over the threshold. They laugh and discuss the consent of their union. As Clementine walks in, she notices the overtly-masculine styling of the rooms, with figurines and models of war, from tanks to soldiers. As they approach their now-shared bedroom, they encounter Lady Randolph, Winston’s mother. Jennie, as she’s called, announces that she’s redecorated the room to make it more suitable for a woman. Horrified at the bows and ribbons, Clementine observes that Jennie makes time for Winston now because he exhibits promise as a politician. She realizes that she will have to challenge Jennie and remove her influence from Winston’s life and house.
As the maid interrupts Winston, informing him that he’s been sent important letters from Parliament, Clementine announces she and Winston will go over the material together, leaving Jennie behind.
Part 1, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Part 1 introduces the theme The Nature of Marriage and Partnership, exploring how Clementine and Winston transform through their marriage. They both share a common origin: the unhappy or perhaps unconventional unions of Winston’s mother, Lady “Jennie” Randolph, and Clementine’s mother, Lady Blanche Hozier, have created offspring who crave stability and attention.
Clementine notes that she and Winston “had both been raised by unconventional, unaffectionate mothers” (19). While Clementine’s mother, Lady Blanche Hozier, marries unhappily, she finds pleasure in the affections of other men, “leaving the caretaking of [the children] to servants” (19). Winston has a similar upbringing—his mother, like Clementine’s, disregarded the restrictions and norms of traditional marriage, and her “number of affairs rivaled that of [Clementine’s] Mother” (19). As will be true for Winston and Clementine’s children later, Winston and his younger brother are raised by their “beloved Nanny Everest” (19).
These private feelings help guide public and political events in the novel. Marriage, as Clementine discusses it, becomes a metaphor for both private happiness and public governance, as Clementine and Winston bond over various marriages in their families and how they affect politics, wealth, and social standing. From the Duke of Marlborough’s union with Consuelo Vanderbilt to Clementine’s own marriage to Winston, Benedict depicts these marriages as more than private relationships: They become ways to consolidate power and fortunes. Consequently, these marriages create children who both reject and emulate these relationships, from Lady Hozier to Clementine, to Clementine’s children with Winston.
Even as Clementine seeks stability, she betrays her future desires for an unorthodox marriage and life in her match with Winston, introducing the theme The Complexities of History and Gender. As her brother Bill teases her for visiting the family home on the morning of her wedding, Clementine confesses that she understands his joke about her “not one but two jilted fiancés—Sidney Cornwallis Peel, grandson of the former prime minister Sir Robert Peel and Lionel Earle, men with lofty titles or positions and the promise of financial security” (14). While both men offered economic advancement and stability, qualities Clementine seems to desire, she could not tolerate a future “of staid decorum and scant hope of purpose” (14). While Clementine chases stability, she implicitly seeks out a life characterized by adventure and fame, revealing her suffragist values.
The morning of her wedding she expresses this sentiment, and, simultaneously, her long-standing desire for stability and her chasing of convention:
I almost snort with laughter at our bohemian mother, never one to follow the strictures of society, church, or family, doubting the appropriateness of her children’s behavior. She, whose own behavior has long flouted the traditions of marriage and child-rearing through multiple simultaneous affairs and long absences. And we, who cling to convention as a life raft in the sea of our mother’s tempestuousness (15).
Her last line and the description of Lady Hozier’s children’s actions in the face of their mother’s unconventional life foreshadow that Clementine will embrace, sometimes unhappily, the same kind of life with Winston. Her nautical metaphor—Hozier’s children on a small boat in a dangerous sea of emotion—reflects Winston’s ever-changing moods, his rages, and his ascent to prime minister, which depends on his position of first lord of the admiralty.
Winston’s political power remains more of a promise than reality when he marries Clementine, but Clementine’s wedding highlights the powerful forces that these upper-class marriages represent, while foreshadowing the uneven path for them both. Seeing a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I during the ceremony while the bishop and Winston chat, Clementine connects with the queen, thinking “she’s taking me to task for allowing the bishop to detract from my moment” (38). Linking herself to this unmarried queen who presided over a period of economic innovation, war, and cultural renaissance, Clementine implicitly chooses a unique path. The bishop describes her role “as a hidden force for good” (38) in Winston’s life, yet she declares her “life will not serve solely as the invisible prop for [her] husband” (38, emphasis added).
In refusing to be an “invisible prop,” Clementine signals her desire to evade the historical erasure often inflicted upon women. While she follows her mother in breaking norms in her marriage and finding her value mostly apart from her children, she does so by choosing power and fame rather than pleasure and personal enjoyment. History will record her value as, like Queen Elizabeth, she will be a woman who puts love of her country above her own personal desires.
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