The Most Beautiful Young Woman in England

Is it any wonder Diana Cooper was both beautiful and purportedly wild? Her real father was said to be a man who was not only handsome but a libertine who played tennis in the nude. She was society's darling until a crushing war turned her into a nurse ministering to burned children and mourning dying young men, many of the latter her closest friends. Afterwords, she became a journalist, acted in and toured with The Miracle on stage, made silent films, had a child, gave parties in Paris where husband Duff Cooper (beloved by her but a libertine like Cust) was Ambassador, was the muse for Evelyn Waugh and other writers, and would eventually come to write three volumes of memoirs herself.


Of her, Anatole Broyard said: "When an unabated personality is combined with taste, intelligence and flair, and set against a structured society, it is one of the finest confections of civilization."

Clive James deduced: "Lady Diana’s knack for getting herself into the newspapers instead of keeping her name out of them, for making a spectacle of herself on stage and screen instead of taking up her natural position as a power behind a throne, might have had something to do with an instinctive recognition that high society was no longer big enough to contain her, and that her proper stamping-ground was society itself." (It should be noted here that the lady - who died in 1986 at the age of 92 and who, when young, was seen as likely to marry the Prince of Wales of her day - came to refer to herself as 'The Wrong Diana.')

Diana Cooper on Diana Cooper: "It has always been my temptation to put myself in other people's shoes: even into a horse's shoes as he strains before the heavy dray; into a ballerina's points as she feels age weigh upon her spring; into Cinderella's slippers as she danced till midnight; into the jackboot that kicks; into the Tommy's boots that tramp; into the magic seven-leaguers. With experience of age I have learned to control this habit of sympathy which deforms truth."