The Decline of the Churchill Sisters: Aristocracy Behind a Wartime Legend – HT

 

 

 

There is a detail about Diana Churchill’s death that almost never makes it into the histories. She died in October 1963 alone in her London flat. Her father was still alive, 90 years old, barely present, but alive. Her sister Sarah was somewhere between marriages and between continents, as she often was by then.

 Her sister Mary was settled, the one who had found solid ground, and Diana, the eldest, the one who had carried the family’s expectations the longest and most seriously, was gone. Winston Churchill learned of her death, and said very little. He was already retreating from the world by then, and whatever he felt about losing his firstborn daughter, he kept it somewhere no one could reach.

 That silence is where this story begins. Winston Churchill’s daughters, Diana, Sarah, and Mary, grew up inside one of the most demanding legends Britain has ever produced. Their father was not simply a famous man. He was, by the time they were adults, something closer to a national symbol, and symbols have no interest in the private lives of the people attached to them.

 What happened to those three women? The specific texture of their marriages, their failures, their recoveries, and in one case, the permanent absence of any recovery is a story that tends to disappear inside the much louder noise of their father’s century. It deserves to be told on its own terms. Part five, the world that made them.

Winston and Clementine Churchill had five children. Two sons, Randolph, who survived his parents in poor health, and Margold, who died of septasemia in 1921 at the age of two, a loss that Clementine carried visibly for the rest of her life. And then the three daughters, Diana born in 1909, Sarah born in 1914, and Mary born in 1922.

Growing up in the Churchill household was not an ordinary experience by any measure. The family moved constantly. Winston’s political career, his financial anxieties, which were substantial and ongoing despite his fame, and his own extraordinary temperament, which demanded vast amounts of energy from everyone around him, kept the household in a state of permanent motion.

 Their primary country home, Chartwell in Kent, was beloved by Winston and a frequent source of stress for Clementine, who found it expensive to run and difficult to manage. Winston bought it in 1922 without telling her first, which established a particular dynamic in the family that the children absorbed without entirely understanding.

Clementine Churchill was a formidable woman. She was sharply intelligent, emotionally disciplined, morally serious, and entirely capable of holding her own in the company of the most powerful men in Europe. She was also frequently exhausted, frequently unwell, and frequently away on long rest cures that the particular strain of being married to Winston Churchill made genuinely necessary.

She spent weeks, sometimes months, away from her children on Mediterranean cruises, in health spars, recovering from the toll that her marriage and her social responsibilities extracted. The children were raised in the practical day-to-day sense by a rotation of nannies and governnesses. Winston Churchill’s relationship with his daughters was loving and inconsistent in the specific way of men who were never taught to make sustained presence a priority.

 He could be warm, tender, genuinely delighted by them. He wrote them affectionate letters when he was away, which was often. He took an interest in their lives in the periodic intense way of someone who arrives and departs rather than remaining. what he could not give them because he had never been given it himself.

 His own father, Lord Randph Churchill, had treated him largely as an inconvenience, was the steady, unremarkable daily attention that children build their sense of security on. Clementine was more consistently present, but her consistency came with its own pressures. She had high standards for behavior, for composure, for the management of emotion, for the way a Churchill daughter presented herself in public, and she communicated these standards with a precision that left little room for imperfection.

Her relationship with Diana was complicated almost from the beginning. Clementine was not always able to extend to her eldest daughter the warmth she could show elsewhere. Her relationship with Sarah was frequently combative, sharpened by Sarah’s unwillingness to accommodate herself to expectations she found unreasonable.

Mary, the youngest, had the smoothest passage through childhood, partly because the family had found a more stable rhythm by the late 1920s, and partly because her temperament generated fewer collision points. But even she absorbed in the ordinary way that children absorb the atmosphere they grow up in the particular kind of pressure that came with being a Churchill.

 The Churchill daughters came of age in the 1930s, a decade that was not straightforward for anyone and was especially complicated for the daughters of prominent families. The old aristocratic world with its countryhouse seasons, its London calendar, its elaborate social rituals, was under serious financial strain. The great estates were shrinking.

 Death duties, introduced in 1894 and increased repeatedly since, were stripping each generation of a significant portion of what they inherited. The men who had fought in the First World War and survived came back to a country that was slowly releasing its grip on the structures that had organized it for two centuries.

The women of those families were asked to maintain the performance of a world that was quietly ceasing to exist beneath them. It was a performance that required tremendous effort and offered diminishing returns. And for the Churchill daughters, who were performing it under the additional pressure of a universally watched name, the effort was considerable from the very beginning.

 The eldest of the three felt that pressure most immediately, most personally, and for the longest time, and what it eventually did to her is the part of this story that deserves the most careful attention. Part four, Diana. the weight of being first. Diana Churchill was the eldest, and she bore it in the way that eldest children in demanding families often do, by internalizing the expectations so thoroughly that they became indistinguishable from her own desires, until the moment they didn’t, and by then the distance between the two was

very hard to measure. She was, by the accounts of people who knew her, a genuinely warm person. She was socially capable, good with people, the kind of woman who made guests feel immediately at ease. She had her mother’s social intelligence and something of her father’s sensitivity to mood.

 But she carried anxiety beneath the surface, a current of it, persistent and quiet that wasn’t always visible until circumstances made it impossible to ignore. Her first marriage in 1932 was to John Bailey whose father Abe Bailey was a South African mining magnate of considerable wealth. The match was arranged with more attention to appropriateness than to feeling and the feeling, it turned out, was not sufficient.

 The marriage was dissolved in 1935. Diana was 26 years old, divorced in a social world that still kept careful count of such things. The divorce marking her in ways that wouldn’t entirely disappear. She married again later that same year, 1935, to Duncan Sandes, a young conservative MP who had recently entered Parliament and was clearly heading somewhere within the party.

 Winston Churchill approved of Sandes, which mattered considerably. He was vigorous, politically serious, and from the right background. The marriage was made. It lasted 25 years, and in many of those years it looked from the outside like a reasonable and even successful arrangement. Duncan Sandes went on to a significant ministerial career.

 He served under Winston Churchill’s wartime government as financial secretary to the war office and after the war held several cabinet positions under Harold McMillan, Minister of Supply, Minister of Housing, Minister of Defense, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. He was a figure of genuine political weight.

 Diana was his wife, present at the right occasions, appropriate in manner, entirely competent in the social role that the wife of an ambitious politician was required to fill. But competence in a role is not the same as finding the role meaningful, and the gap between the two was growing through the 1940s and into the 1950s in ways that Diana managed to keep for a long time out of view.

 Sandies was absent in the way that politically ambitious men of that era understood to be simply the nature of things. Parliament, the ministry, the party meetings, the constituency work. These filled his days and many of his evenings. The children, three of them, Julian, Edwina, and Celia, were largely Diana’s responsibility to raise alongside the management of the household and the maintenance of the social calendar that kept the family connected to its network.

 It was a great deal of invisible work performed with visible grace, and it left very little room for whatever Diana needed that was not accounted for in the structure. She began seeing a psychiatrist at some point during the 1950s, which was not in her world a neutral act. Mental illness was not unknown in aristocratic families.

 It was, if anything, rather common, but acknowledging it, seeking help for it in a formal clinical sense, was still considered a form of weakness that people of her background were generally expected to rise above. The expectation was endurance. You managed, you maintained, you projected the required composure, and whatever was happening on the inside was your own affair.

 Diana could not rise above it. The depression that had probably been present in some attenuated form for years became through the 1950s something heavier and more consuming. The marriage was by this period offering very little of what she needed. When she and Duncan Sandies divorced in 1960, formerly after 25 years with three grown or nearly grown children, the structure that had organized her days, however inadequately, was simply gone.

 She was 51. She was a divorced woman, which in her social world at that age and of that background still carried implications that were not entirely neutral. Her children were moving into their own lives. Her public identity had been built entirely around a marriage and a family role that no longer existed, and the private Diana, the one underneath the capable surface, was in very serious difficulty.

She was hospitalized in the spring of 1963 receiving clinical treatment for her depression. She was discharged. She returned to her flat in Nightsbridge. The people around her, her family, her friends had varying and imperfect levels of understanding of how precarious things had become, filtered through the general tendency of her world to take women’s expressions of suffering less seriously than the suffering warranted.

On October 20th, 1963, Diana Churchill was found dead in her flat. She had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. She was 54 years old. The inquest recorded the cause of death. The family kept as much as possible private, and in 1963 that was still largely achievable. The press reported her death briefly and without extensive detail.

 The official response was one of dignified sorrow, the particular composure of a family that had been performing composure for generations, and had not yet run out of the capacity to do it. Winston Churchill was 88 years old and in serious physical decline. He was told those who were close to him in those final months said he retreated further into himself after October 1963.

That something had gone out of him that no conversation could restore. He suffered a severe stroke in November 1964 from which he never recovered. He died on January 24th, 1965. and was buried in the churchyard at Bladen in Oxfordshire in the shadow of Blenhham Palace. Diana was already there. She had preceded him by 14 months, the first of his children in the ground, the one whose death he had absorbed in silence.

What happened to Diana Churchill is not on one level mysterious. Depression is a serious illness. It kills people. The fact that it killed her in 1963 rather than at some other point is partly explained by the very specific conditions of her life, the structure of her marriage, the emotional distance she had been navigating since childhood, the social world that told her at every point that the correct response to suffering was to manage it quietly, and that seeking help was a form of confession that well- bred women were

not supposed to make. She was given by her world a role so thoroughly defined that it left no room for the person filling it to have needs of her own. When the role finally ended, when the marriage dissolved and the children grew and the structure collapsed, there was nothing behind it that had been allowed to develop into something she could stand on.

 There is a particular cruelty in the timeline that is easy to miss. Diana died in October 1963. The following month, November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, an event that seized the world’s attention so completely that almost everything else from that autumn was absorbed into its shadow.

 And then in January 1965, Winston Churchill himself died, producing the enormous state funeral that became for a generation the definitive image of national mourning. Diana was buried twice over in a sense, once in the ground at Bladen, and once beneath events so large they had no space for her. She had tried to be what was asked of her for 54 years, and it had not saved her.

 Her world gave her every outward advantage, the name, the education, the social position, and almost none of the interior resources that might have made those advantages livable. What strikes you, looking back at the record of her life, is how little space she was ever given to be uncertain. The aristocratic world of the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s did not have much vocabulary for a woman who was struggling beneath a capable surface.

 It had expectations and it had composure and it had the broad assumption that women of Diana’s background were equipped by birth and by upbringing to manage whatever came at them. The assumption was wrong, and the wrongness of it was never examined until it was far too late to be of any use to her. Part three.

 Sarah, the one who tried to break free. If Diana Churchill’s tragedy was one of slow compression, a life that pressed steadily inward until there was nowhere left to go. Sarah Churchills was almost its mirror. She pushed outward again and again with a determination that was both admirable and in the end not quite sufficient against the specific forces she was pushing against.

Sarah was the third child born in 1914 and it was clear from relatively early that she was differently made from the template her family offered. She was theatrical, warm, quick-witted, and genuinely restless in a way that social performance alone could not satisfy. She had her father’s gift for language and his romantic temperament, and she had absorbed, perhaps more than her sisters, the Churchill tendency to throw themselves at things rather than accommodate them.

 In the mid 1930s, she began working as a professional dancer and actress. This was not a small decision in the world she came from. The stage was not for women of her background considered a respectable vocation. Chorus work in particular carried associations that the Churchill household found uncomfortable. Winston and Clementine objected.

 Sarah continued anyway. In 1936, she fell in love with Vic Oliver. Oliver was Austrianborn. born Victor Oliver Samk in 1898, making him 38 to Sarah’s 22 when they became seriously involved. He was a professional comedian and musician, well known on the BBC radio circuit and in West End variety theater.

 He had been married once before. He was Jewish at a time when that fact alone generated specific anxieties in certain social circles and he was in the Churchill family’s assessment entirely the wrong kind of person. Winston Churchill’s opposition was not restrained. He contacted officials at the American Embassy in London in an effort to obstruct Oliver’s travel to the United States, attempting to use diplomatic leverage to separate the couple before the situation became irreversible. He failed.

Sarah and Vic Oliver married in New York City on December 24th, 1936. They returned to England and encountered a family atmosphere that had the particular temperature of people who are being very polite about something they consider a catastrophe. The marriage deteriorated quickly beneath its surface.

 Oliver was unfaithful with a regularity that made the relationship’s foundations unstable almost from the beginning. Sarah continued to work. She took stage roles. She performed. She kept building the career she had started, but the personal foundation was crumbling and she knew it. They separated in the early years of the war and Sarah joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1941.

Her training was as a photographic interpreter, a role that involved the close technical analysis of aerial reconnaissance photographs to identify military targets, troop concentrations, airfield construction, industrial installations. It was skilled work that required patience, precision, and a capacity for sustained concentration.

She was good at it, which surprised no one who knew how sharp she actually was beneath the theatrical personality. She was also during these years becoming her father’s most consistent personal companion at the great diplomatic gatherings of the war. She accompanied Winston to the Thrron Conference in November and December 1943 where he met with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin for the first time as a three-party summit.

It was one of the most consequential meetings of the 20th century. The Allied leaders coordinating the strategy for the final years of the war, laying the initial groundwork for what would eventually become the postwar order. Sarah was present. She managed Winston’s domestic arrangements, moderated his moods, ensured he slept at least occasionally, and provided the particular comfort of family in rooms where almost everything else was geopolitical calculation.

She was at Yaltta in February 1945, the Crimean Conference, where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin made the agreements that would shape the map of postwar Europe. Roosevelt was visibly unwell. He would die two months later. Stalin was operating from a position of rapidly strengthening advantage as Soviet forces advanced into Eastern Europe.

 Churchill was fighting with diminishing leverage to prevent outcomes he could already see were coming. Sarah was in those rooms watching, understanding what she was watching. After the war, the private life resumed. Her divorce from Vic Oliver was finalized in 1945. She was 31 years old with a decade of extraordinary experience behind her and very little stable ground beneath her.

Anthony Bochamp entered the picture in the late 1940s. He was a photographer, well regarded professionally, smooth in company, the kind of man who seemed in the early phase of a relationship to be exactly what the moment required. Sarah married him in 1949. The marriage was in trouble within a few years.

 Her relationship with alcohol, which had been a feature of her social life since at least the wartime period, became more visible as the 1950s went on. It was not a secret among people who knew her. It was increasingly a public matter. In October 1957, she was detained by police in Malibu, California after a disturbance at her home there.

 The American press reported it at length. She was in their coverage primarily Winston Churchill’s daughter. A famous man’s famous child having a public difficulty, which was its own kind of story, distinct from anything she had actually done or was. Anthony Bochamp had already been dead for two months by the time of the Malibu incident.

 He died in August 1957, having taken an overdose of sleeping medication. The inquest returned an open verdict. The evidence was insufficient to conclusively establish intent, and the verdict reflected that legal uncertainty. Sarah had been in New York. She returned to London and did what she had always done.

 She managed, she appeared, she gave the press what it required and kept what she could private. Her third marriage in 1962 was to Henry Oley, the 23rd Baron Odley. He was 63. She was 47. He was quiet and kind and appeared to offer, if nothing else, steadiness. He died in 1963, one year after the wedding, leaving Sarah a widow and a baroness and entirely alone in the particular way that a sequence of losses accumulates into something more than the sum of its parts.

She continued, “That is worth saying plainly. She wrote poetry, some of it genuinely good, with a lyric quality that her theatrical background gave a particular kind of precision. She performed in theater and on television. She appeared on American variety programs. She was in person remarkable company, quick and funny, and unexpectedly honest about her own experience in ways that made people feel trusted.

 But she never found the stable foundation that might have made the other things sustainable, and the years extracted their cost. She died in September 1982 at the age of 67. The length of her obituaries was roughly proportionate to how interesting her life had been. The frame in which they placed it was almost exclusively that of her father’s daughter.

 She had spent her adult life trying to be something else, something more specifically hers. She got closer than Diana did. She lasted longer, but the thing she was trying to reach remained for most of her life just slightly out of range. Part two. The architecture of a particular kind of suffering. To look at Diana and Sarah Churchill without looking at the structure around them is to mistake the symptoms for the disease.

 Their difficulties were not simply personal misfortune. They were not random. The specific forms their suffering took. Diana’s depression and the social isolation that made treatment so delayed and so insufficient. Sarah’s restlessness and her relationship with alcohol and the succession of marriages that each promised something she couldn’t quite locate were shaped with considerable precision by the conditions of the world they had grown up in.

The aristocratic world of early 20th century Britain was organized around the performance of a particular kind of life. Not dishonesty exactly. The people in it believed in many of the values they were enacting but performance in the sense that the visible surface was treated as the substance. The right address, the right marriage, the right appearance at the right occasions, the right school for the children.

 These were not incidental concerns. They were what respectability meant, and respectability was not optional. For women, the demands were precise and narrow in ways that are difficult to fully appreciate today. The primary obligation was to marry well and to make that marriage work, which in practice meant to make it look as though it was working regardless of what was actually happening inside it.

 The inner life of an aristocratic woman was by social convention her own business which meant it was no one’s business. That it was not to be made visible, not to be allowed to disrupt the surface, not to be a claim on anyone else’s attention or resources. seeking help, formal clinical help for depression or anxiety or the kind of sustained suffering that Diana Churchill experienced was understood as a confession of inadequacy.

 The expectation was endurance. Women of that background were supposed to manage. The ones who couldn’t quietly were considered to have failed in some way that reflected on them rather than on the structure they were operating in. Diana was failed by this structure most completely. She was the eldest daughter, the one who had absorbed the most direct pressure of expectation, the one whose marriage lasted longest and delivered least, the one who was given a role so thoroughly defined from the outside that it left very little room for whatever

she actually needed to stay alive inside it. When the role ended and the structure collapsed, there was nothing behind it that had been allowed to develop. She had been given by her world every outward advantage and almost none of the interior resources that might have made those advantages livable. Sarah’s version was different but related.

 She had pushed against the frame earlier and more visibly, which meant she had more freedom and also more exposure. Every stumble happened in public because she was a Churchill and Churchills were always watched. The freedom she had claimed by choosing her own work and her own husbands was real, but it came without the support structure that might have made the choices sustainable.

 She had the independence without the safety net. There is also the money question which runs beneath every other one and is rarely addressed directly in accounts of aristocratic women’s lives because the aristocracy itself was not comfortable addressing it directly. The Churchill family’s finances were never straightforward.

Winston had earned enormous sums through journalism and books. His output was staggering and his fees reflected his fame. But his expenditure consistently outpaced his income. Chartwell alone was a perpetual financial anxiety. The social world he and Clementine operated in required expenditure that was essentially mandatory.

 The right London address, the right schools, the entertaining, the servants, the travel. His children inherited his name and his social position, but nothing that could properly be called a financial foundation. Diana’s marriages had both in different ways come freighted with the expectation of money that proved more complicated than it initially appeared.

John Bailey’s family wealth was real but belonged to his father. Duncan Sandes was an MP, then a minister on a minister’s salary supporting a household and a political career and three children in a social world that expected more than a government salary could provide. The gap between what was expected of a Churchill daughter and what the Churchill daughters actually had access to was a persistent grinding pressure that sat beneath everything else.

 The marriages, the choices, the visible surface of a life that looked more solid from the outside than it was. Sarah’s version of this was more acute because she was also trying to build an independent career in a world that charged women higher prices for the same failures. When things went wrong for her publicly, the arrests, the press coverage, the incidents that made newspapers, the financial cost was added to the reputational one, and she had fewer reserves of either kind than the name she carried implied.

Mary Churchill married Christopher SS in 1947, a union that produced five children and lasted until Soms’s death in 1987. SS had a distinguished career of his own, cabinet minister, British ambassador to France, life peer. He and Mary were by all available evidence genuinely good for each other. Mary found in her marriage and in her family and eventually in the serious intellectual project of writing her mother’s biography the elements of a life that held together.

 Her biography of Clementine Churchill published in 1979 is not simply a beautiful daughter’s tribute. It is a genuinely considered work, honest about her mother’s difficulties, cleareyed about the costs of the Churchill marriage on both parties, careful in its treatment of a woman who had been as much shaped by expectation as her daughters would be.

Mary had thought hard about her family, and the book is the evidence of that thinking. It is the work of a woman who had found a way to be inside the Churchill story without being consumed by it. She was created a life pier in 2005. Baroness SS of Fletching. She died in 2014 at the age of 91 having outlived all of her siblings by considerable years.

 What gave Mary the outcome her sisters didn’t have? partly the stability of her marriage, which was foundational in ways that neither Diana’s nor Sarah’s managed to be. Partly, her temperament, which was warmer and less combustible than Sarah’s, and less prone to the inward collapse that had taken Diana, partly perhaps, the timing of her childhood.

She was the youngest by 8 years, arriving when the family had found a more settled rhythm, and she absorbed the Churchill atmosphere in a less concentrated form. But it is also worth noting what Mary did not do. She did not in any sustained way try to be something outside the frame. She worked within the structure that her world offered, the marriage, the household, the children, the biography, and she found within that structure enough that was genuinely hers to sustain her.

 She was not diminished by the frame the way Diana was. She was not fighting it the way Sarah was. She had somehow found a way to inhabit it. That is the closest thing this story has to a good ending. Part one, the legend and its remainders. Winston Churchill died on January 24th, 1965. The state funeral was one of the largest Britain had seen in living memory.

 The procession through London, the lying in state in Westminster Hall, the barge on the tempames, the train to Oxfordshire, all of it was enormous and deliberate and final. He was buried at Bladen in the churchyard of St. Martins in the shadow of Blenhim. Diana was already there.

 The legend calcified quickly as legends do when the person has become a symbol before they die. The wartime speeches, the decisions, the extraordinary political career that had spanned six decades, all of it was preserved in a form that resisted complication. Churchill was and would remain the defining British figure of the 20th century. That was settled.

What was less settled and what the legend had very little interest in accommodating was the private history that ran alongside the public one. The three daughters, the specific texture of their lives, the costs they had paid. These were not part of the story that the Churchill legacy required. They were footnotes mentioned in biographies as context and then moved past.

 Sarah Churchill spent the years after her father’s death in a persistent and unresolved negotiation with his memory. She was asked regularly to be his daughter to appear at commemorations to provide the human connection to the legend that the public wanted to confirm and remember and authenticate. She did it when she could.

 But her own story, the marriages, the drinking, the genuine creative work, the long years of searching for something she couldn’t locate, had no natural home in the Churchill mythology. It existed in the margins where she had always been most alive and where she had also suffered most. Mary carried the legacy with evident love and as far as it is possible to tell without bitterness.

She became in her later decades something of its steward, the last of the children, the one who had written most seriously about the family, the one who was still present at the commemorations and the anniversaries and the various official acts of remembrance that a legend of that scale generates. She did it with dignity and with what appeared to be genuine feeling.

 But even she in performing that role remained embedded in a definition of herself that other people had provided. She was Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, Christopher SS’s wife, Clementine Churchill’s biographer. The self as a freestanding entity, as something defined primarily from the inside, was not quite the language her world had given her.

 What the silence costs, go back to that moment in October 1963, to the flat in Nightsbridge, to the news traveling across London, to the family, to Winston being told, to the decision to keep it as quiet as possible. The silence that surrounded Diana Churchill’s death was not malicious. It was the silence of people who had been trained their whole lives to keep surfaces intact, who genuinely believed perhaps that composure was a form of respect, that privacy was a form of protection, that the less said, the better was a principle that served the

dead as well as the living. What the silence actually cost is harder to name. It cost Diana Churchill the acknowledgment that what had happened to her was serious, was structural, was not simply a personal failure, but a consequence of specific conditions that her world had created and maintained and refused to examine.

It cost Sarah Churchill the same acknowledgement in a different key. The recognition that her struggles were not character flaws, but responses to a structure that had demanded things of her it couldn’t actually support. The world that produced the Churchill sisters had given them extraordinary raw material, intelligence, social capability, access to the most important rooms of the most important century.

 It had given them a name that opened every door it encountered, and it had given them, as their primary framework for understanding themselves and their lives, a set of expectations so thoroughly external, so completely organized around the visible surface that it left very little room for the interior life to be anything other than a private burden.

 Diana Churchill carried that burden until she could not. Sarah Churchill carried it differently, fighting it rather than containing it, and wore herself down in the fighting. Mary Churchill found a way to carry it that did not destroy her, which is perhaps the most honest form of good fortune available in a story like this one.

 They were Winston Churchill’s daughters. They were also, and more importantly themselves, three women who had been given enormous amounts and prepared for very little, who had navigated a world that measured them by standards designed for someone else, and who had each, in their own way, done the best they could with what they were handed.

 Diana’s best was not enough to keep her alive. That is the sentence that should not be softened or moved past or incorporated quietly into a larger story about aristocratic decline. It is the center of this one. She deserved better than the world she got. So did Sarah. So in their different and less final ways did all of them.

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