Author Q&A
A dedicated leader of fashion…
Q Your portrayal of Audrey Withers is so evocative. How did you go about piecing together her life story?
A I set about researching Audrey Withers’ life in the same way I do all my books, which is to approach the archive that houses the family papers, in this case, Somerville College, Oxford. That yielded excellent material about her childhood including fascinating letters and photographs from her various correspondents. I then approached Condé Nast in London with a request to read the archive of Vogue magazine, only to be given the heart-breaking news that Audrey Withers and Cecil Beaton had destroyed all the pre-1942 archive material and photographs for the paper salvage effort during the war. It was a very sad moment but I was fortunate to find a series of memos in the Condé Nast archive in New York that had escaped the purge and those unseen documents gave me the wartime history of Vogue in minute detail.
Other information came from interviews with people Audrey worked with, careful reading of the issues of from the 20 years of her editorship and conversations with people who knew her in later life. It was a jigsaw puzzle of a thousand pieces but a very rewarding one
