Essex Leila Hilary Eyres-Monsell, Viscountess Monsell (formerly Drury, née French; 26 September 1907 – March 1996) was an English socialite.
[1] Essex Leila Hilary French was born on 26 September 1907, at Dundee, Natal, South Africa, the first daughter of English cricketer Lt Col the Hon Edward Gerald Fleming French DSO, Deputy Governor of Dartmoor Prison and Governor of Newcastle Prison (1883-1970) and Leila Elizabeth Fyfe King (d. 1959), daughter of Robert King, of Natal, South Africa.
[2][3] Her grandfather was Field Marshal John French, 1st Earl of Ypres (1852-1925), Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in World War I.
[...] They are an unmodern pair of sisters, of a picture-calendar loveliness, a triumph of the chocolate box: it is easy to look interesting, and so difficult to be triumphantly pretty.
They are very English, and when for a time, in chintz aprons, they sold flowers in Nellie Taylor’s olde worlde shoppe, every young man entering to buy a gardenia or a bunch of mignonette thought himself suddenly transported to the celestial regions, to a heaven designed in all its wholehearted prettiness by Maud Goodman.