Mary Clive

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

Life Born into the Anglo-Irish Longford family, Lady Mary was the fourth child of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford. Her siblings later achieved individual prominence, her elder brother Edward was a politician and artistic director of Dublin's Gate Theatre, while her other brother was Lord Longford, a politician and social reformer. She described 1926 as a 'bumper dowdy year' for debutantes, and the men she was introduced to as 'practically deformed...Some were without chins. Some had no foreheads. Hardly any of them had backs to their heads.' She also advertised Pond's cold cream during her time as a debutante.

The 1926 United Kingdom general strike occurred the same year, and she served tea to striking lorry drivers. Her intelligence was considered a handicap for a debutante, so Lady Mary had to 'palm herself off as a low-brow'. Lady Mary spent three seasons as a debutante and then resolved to get a job, lodging in Chelsea for almost five years. In 1931 she embarked on a trip around the world, beginning in Canada in a luxury hotel and ending on a sheep station in New Zealand. She later went on a secret solo bicycle trip across France and Switzerland.

Lady Mary took a secretarial course, and worked for a writer who praised free love; however she found work insufficiently rewarding and then resolved not to work again unless she was extremely well paid. 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.

As a gossip columnist she suffered from the "smallness of a smart person's visiting list" and relied on her younger sisters for material. The popularity of the memoir led to Lord Beaverbrook signing Clive for the Londoner's Diary section of his London Evening Standard. She nicknamed Beaverbrook the 'Goblin King', and he later appointed her a chief reporter. She said of the beginning of her journalistic career that she '...only started writing for the papers because it was a terrific novelty—and there was a substantial cheque.' She earned ten guineas a week for her two columns, on dresses and 'intelligent' gossip. Her fellow writers on the Londoner's Diary included Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian Fleming and John Betjeman. In 1937 Lady Mary was a contributor to the short lived magazine Night and Day, edited by Graham Greene.

Lady Mary wrote two historical biographies, of John Donne and King Edward IV of England. Much earlier (between 1932 and 1937) she also wrote four novels, for which she used the pen-name "Hans Duffy".