Lady Mary Clive

Lady Mary Katherine Clive (née Pakenham 23 August 1907 – 19 March 2010)[1] was a British writer and historian, known for her memoirs of her family and her time as a debutante.

[1] Mary's childhood was split between North Aston Hall in Oxfordshire and summer and Easter at Tullynally Castle in County Westmeath, Ireland.

[1] Lady Mary said that perhaps her mother had not "noticed that children's fashions had changed and as we grew older, we became acutely aware of the eccentricity of our appearance...summer and winter alike, we had to wear brown, ribbed woolen stockings and brown boots, which were a nuisance all the year round...worse still was the shame of them, which ate into our very souls.

"[1] Of her 1964 memoir The Day of Reckoning, the Daily Telegraph said that she wrote "with the acuteness of observation and lack of sentimentality that characterised her own personality.

"[1] Her childhood Christmases were spent at her mother's ancestral home of Middleton Park in Oxfordshire, and she recalled these in her 1955 novel Christmas with the Savages.

Lady Mary returned Whitfield to its original Georgian design after the war, removing the Victorian wings of the house.

[1] They had two children, George, who predeceased her, and a daughter, Alice, a former High Sheriff of Cornwall, who is married to Simon Lennox-Boyd, 2nd Viscount Boyd of Merton.

[2] As an art student she studied in London, Rome, and Munich, and on her return shared a studio in Chelsea where her younger sister Violet would pose nude for her.