Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath are three of our most famous authors. For the first time this book tells in full the story of the remarkable mothers who shaped them.

Julia Stephen, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath were fascinating women in their own rights, and their relationships with their daughters were exceptional; they profoundly influenced the writers’ lives, literature and attitude to feminism. Too often in the past Virginia, Agatha and Sylvia have been defined by their lovers – Mothers of the Mind redresses the balance by charting the complex, often contradictory, bond between mother and daughter. Drawing on previously unpublished sources from archives around the world and accounts from family and friends of the women, this book offers a new perspective on these iconic authors.

From their father – ‘the greatest Englishman’ – to their brother, golden boy Randolph, to their eccentric and exciting cousins, the Mitford Girls, they were surrounded by a clan of larger-than-life characters which often saw them overlooked. Marigold died when she was very young but her three sisters lived lives full of passion, drama and tragedy ?

Diana, intense and diffident; Sarah, glamorous and stubborn; Mary, dependable yet determined – each so different but each imbued with a sense of responsibility toward each other and their country. Far from being cosseted debutantes, these women were eyewitnesses at some of the most important events in world history, including at the Second World War Conferences of Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. Yet The Churchill Girls is not a story set on the battlefields or in Parliament; it is an intimate saga that sheds light on the complex dynamics of family set against the backdrop of the tumultuous twentieth century.

Accomplished biographer Rachel Trethewey draws on unpublished family letters from the Churchill archives to bring Winston and Clementine’s daughters out of the shadows and tell their remarkable stories for the first time.