Essex Leila Hilary Eyres-Monsell, Viscountess Monsell' (formerly Drury, née French; 26 September 1907 – March 1996) was an English socialite. She and her sister

Valerie Violet French Violet Valerie French Brougham Kindersley (13 February 1909 – 18 July 1997) was a Natal-born English socialite. She and her sister Essex Leila Hilary French were known as the "French sisters" and included in ''The Book of Beauty'' by Cecil Beat ...

were known as the "French sisters" and included in ''The Book of Beauty'' by

Cecil Beaton Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the t ...

Biography

Essex Leila Hilary French was born on 26 September 1907, at Dundee, Natal, South Africa, the first daughter of English cricketer Lt Col the Hon

Edward Gerald Fleming French Edward Gerald Fleming French (11 December 1883 – 17 September 1970) was an English cricketer. French was a left-handed batsman, although his bowling style is unknown. He was born in Woburn Sands, Buckinghamshire. He was the son of John Fr ...

DSO, Deputy Governor of Dartmoor Prison and Governor of Newcastle Prison (1883-1970) and Leila Elizabeth Fyfe King (d. 1959), daughter of Robert King, of Natal, South Africa.Townend, Peter. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 105th edition. London, U.K.: Burke's Peerage Ltd, 1970 Her grandfather was Field Marshal John French, 1st Earl of Ypres (1852-1925), Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in World War I. In the 1920s, Essex French attended St James's School, a contemporary of Joan Leigh Fermor, who detested her. On 30 July 1929 Essex Leila Hilary French married Captain Vyvyan Dru Drury, of Castle Kevin, Annamoe, co. Wicklow, son of Francis Saxham Elwes Drury. Their daughter Romayne Drury (b. 1930) married Vittorio Giorgini. Essex French and Vyvyan Drury divorced in 1936. In 1933 she was included, together with her sister, in ''The Book of Beauty'' by

: "'Sugar and spice and all that's nice' - that’s what the French sisters are made of. ..Essex, pink and white, with raven hair, as silky as a spaniel’s, and fear-like periwinkle eyes, is the most graceful in movement. ..They are an unmodern pair of sisters, of a picture-calendar loveliness, a triumph of the chocolate box: it is easy to look interesting, and so difficult to be triumphantly pretty. They are very English, and when for a time, in chintz aprons, they sold flowers in Nellie Taylor’s olde worlde shoppe, every young man entering to buy a gardenia or a bunch of mignonette thought himself suddenly transported to the celestial regions, to a heaven designed in all its wholehearted prettiness by Maud Goodman." On 25 July 1950 she married

Bolton Eyres-Monsell, 1st Viscount Monsell Bolton Meredith Eyres-Monsell, 1st Viscount Monsell, (22 February 1881 – 21 March 1969) was a British Conservative Party politician who served as Chief Whip until 1931 and then as First Lord of the Admiralty. Biography His parents were Lt. Co ...

. She died in March 1996 at her home 78 Whitehall Court, London.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:French, Essex Leila Hilary 1907 births 1996 deaths English socialites Monsell