Lady 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.

Born into the Anglo-Irish Longford family, Lady Mary was the fourth child of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford. After the Earl was killed at the Battle of Gallipoli in World War I in 1915, Lady Mary's mother, the daughter of the 7th Earl of Jersey, was greatly affected by her husband's death, and her sorrow affected her relationship with her six children. Mary's childhood was split between North Aston Hall in Oxfordshire and summer and Easter at Tullynally Castle in County Westmeath, Ireland. 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 had three sisters, Violet, a biographer, Pansy, a novelist, and Julia.

She and her siblings had few friends outside of her immediate family, a fact that she attributed to the out-of-date clothes that they wore as children. Lady Mary said that perhaps her mother had not "noticed that children's fashions had changed and as we grew older, we became acutely aware of the eccentricity of our appearance...summer and winter alike, we had to wear brown, ribbed woolen stockings and brown boots, which were a nuisance all the year round...worse still was the shame of them, which ate into our very souls." Of her 1964 memoir The Day of Reckoning, the Daily Telegraph said that she wrote "with the acuteness of observation and lack of sentimentality that characterised her own personality."

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