Siân Evans is a Welsh historical author, journalist, and film consultant, known for her guidebooks for the National Trust, of which she has written seven, and her works of social and cultural history.
[3] Her first biography was Mrs Ronnie: The society hostess who collected kings (2013) which dealt with the life of Dame Margaret Greville of Polesden Lacey.
Her first book not to be published by the National Trust was Queen bees: Six brilliant and extraordinary society hostesses between the wars (Two Rivers, 2016) which chronicled the lives of six women, Nancy Astor, Maud Cunard, Laura Mae Corrigan, Margaret Greville, Sibyl Colefax, and Edith Londonderry, some of whom were of humble origins,[1] who became successful society hostesses in Britain between the World Wars.
Reviewing the book in The Times, Virginia Nicholson found it to excel in anecdotes, punchlines, and descriptions of the detail of social mountaineering but to lack a deeper analysis of the motives of its subjects.
[4] Frances Wilson in The Spectator described the women as less "brilliant and extraordinary" than "silly, sycophantic and generally pro-Nazi", feeling that Evans had overstated the importance of her subjects and questioning the decision to treat them as a group rather than singly, "queen bees being hard to distinguish in a swarm".