Introduction

When Lilian Share married Harold Sidney Harmsworth in 1893, she was the daughter of an industrious London merchant based in Forest Hill. He was the younger brother and business associate of a journalist in the process of buying up a number of newspapers in difficulty. In the words of one press historian, ‘it was a rather lower middle-class match’. However, things soon improved after the brothers acquired the London Evening Standard the following year, and two years after that founded the Daily Mail, shortly followed by the Daily Mirror. Within two decades, Lilian’s father was bankrupt, but she was now the titled wife of a press baron and a millionaire, her husband having been raised to the peerage in 1914. The couple were, in effect, estranged by then, after a number of years living between their homes in London and La Dragonnière, near Monte Carlo, and raising three children. After choosing to remain initially in the Monte Carlo home, Lilian settled permanently in France, where she became a close friend and benefactor of a number of French writers, the most prominent of whom was André Gide. This wealthy, diplomatically separated lifestyle would doubtless have continued unhindered, were it not for the devastating tragedy of the war, in which two of their three sons were killed in action. Henceforth, she was noted for becoming withdrawn, unpredictable and rather unreliable in terms of her larger family affections and her substantial arts patronage; he became fervently opposed to war, ultimately espousing the cases of the Black Shirts, Nazi Germany and the British Union of Fascists.

Lady Rothermere’s life in France did not stop at endowing arts projects and providing substantial funds and sometimes unpredictable forms of friendly benevolence for a vast number of British, American and French writers. She published a number of translations into English, the most noteworthy of which was a playful literary satire by Gide, Prometheus Ill-Bound (Prométhée Mal-Enchaînée), and established a principle of offering artistic retreats at her home in the Alps to writers in need.