Sherman's Wife: A childhood among the English Catholic aristocracy

Sherman's Wife is Julia Camoys Stonor's blackly humorous childhood memoir. Her mother, Jeanne, came from an impecunious Catholic aristocratic family and careened her way through the bedrooms of Mayfair, Madrid and Rhode Island. Her father was Sherman, the half-American 6th Baron Camoys whom Jeanne effectively blackmailed into marriage. Jeanne insisted that she and Sherman spend their honeymoon with one of her lovers, Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Once installed at the Stonor Park estate, Jeanne set about acquiring money and power through any means possible, including but not limited to theft, sexual blackmail, and murder.

In this frank and unflinching portrait of English upper class life in the 1940s, Julia Camoys Stonor manages to evoke Mommie Dearest and Brideshead Revisited in equal measure.