The Irrepressible Mary Jeune, Victorian Influencer

The Irrepressible Mary Jeune, Victorian Influencer

Amelia Fletcher, Author of the biography

Interviewed by Dr Tony Fincham

At the end of the 19th century Mary Jeune (pronounced June) was one of the most renowned and influential people in Britain, ostensibly through her journalism on social and women’s affairs, and her uniquely diverse salon, but also clandestinely through her connections with those in power.

Spanning 85 years, from a bizarrely spartan upbringing in the Scottish Highlands to her death in 1931, this account of Jeune’s life offers fresh views of well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, Millicent Fawcett, Randolph and Winston Churchill. At the same time, it contains a rogues’ gallery of eccentrics and mavericks who have since sunk, like her, into obscurity.

Behind an exterior indomitable enough to inspire Wilde’s Lady Bracknell lay a far more approachable personality. This book reveals the many dimensions and contradictions of a…