Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of Anita Leslie

Anita Leslie was a celebrated biographer who wrote extensively on subjects who were often her own relatives, such as her great-aunt Jennie Churchill, mother of Winston, and the sculptor Clare Sheridan, a cousin. She also wrote a life of Rodin in Rodin: Immortal Peasant (1939) and the best-selling Edwardians in Love (1972). In 1983 her best-selling wartime memoir A Story Half Told detailed her experiences as an ambulance driver in the French Army during the Second World War. This was based on a more revealing memoir entitled Train to Nowhere (1948). After the war, her life was, at first, haphazard. A complicated and tumultuous divorce from her first husband, a concealed birth and a second marriage are all revealed in candid, breathless letters. Her second husband was Commander Bill King who singlehandedly circumnavigated the world. Anita Leslie was a true heroine fighting the circumstances of her life, bravely navigating her own flawed and bewildered self. Penny Perrick brings together the intricacies of Leslie’s life in a stunning biography telling of adventure, memories, heartache and loss.