Margot Asquith Biography Quotes 13 Report mistakes

Early Life
Margot Asquith was born Emma Alice Margaret Tennant in 1864 into a prominent industrial and political family. Her father, Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Baronet, was a successful Scottish industrialist and Liberal member of Parliament, and the Tennant household moved easily between Scotland and London. Margot and her beloved elder sister Laura grew up amid privilege, art, and debate, an upbringing that encouraged self-confidence and a distinctive voice. Energetic and athletic, a daring horsewoman, she cultivated a taste for conversation as sport, and for friendship as an intellectual discipline. The sociable and searching atmosphere of her youth prepared her for a life in which personality and opinion counted as much as pedigree.

The Souls and the Making of a Voice
As a young woman Margot became a central figure in the circle later known as the Souls, a loosely knit company of aristocrats, politicians, and writers who prized quick minds and quick wit. Around drawing-room fires she sparred with future leaders such as Arthur Balfour and George Curzon, and shared intense companionship with Laura, whose marriage to the politician and sportsman Alfred Lyttelton entwined the Tennants with the political class. The Souls provided Margot with an audience and a standard. In their company she refined her manner of fearless, sometimes caustic observation, forming habits of diary-keeping and letter-writing that would later anchor her career as an author.

Marriage to H. H. Asquith
Margot married the rising Liberal statesman Herbert Henry Asquith in 1894, after the death of his first wife, Helen Melland. Marriage thrust her into an already-formed family; she became stepmother to Raymond, Herbert, Arthur, Violet, and Cyril Asquith, each of whom would make a substantial mark in law, letters, public service, or politics. Margot and H. H. Asquith later had two children of their own: Elizabeth and Anthony. The household was a forum for argument and loyalty in equal measure. Margot relished the role of confidante and critic, sharpening her husband's case in private while challenging him when she judged him slow to act. She also cultivated friendships with leading Liberals such as Sir Edward Grey and R. B. Haldane, hosting gatherings where politics and personality mixed freely.

At the Center of Power
When H. H. Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, Margot entered one of the most exposed roles in British public life. She made it her own. Her dinners and drawing rooms became extensions of the political arena, frequented by colleagues and rivals, including Winston Churchill, whose fortunes were closely tied to the government's fate. Frank to a fault, Margot attracted both admiration and resentment; she defended her husband with ardor and sometimes aggravated his critics with remarks that refused to be ornamental. The First World War brought acute strains. Family pride darkened into grief when her stepson Raymond was killed in action in 1916. Political tensions gathered as David Lloyd George challenged Asquith's leadership in wartime; Margot distrusted Lloyd George's methods and never forgave the maneuvering that brought down her husband's ministry later that year. The resulting split in Liberal ranks would shadow their lives.

Author and Public Speaker
After the fall from office, Margot turned more fully to writing. She had always kept journals and composed quicksilver letters; now she reshaped these into books that offered portraits of late Victorian and Edwardian society and candid judgments of the mighty. Her autobiography, published after the war, was widely read for its brio and unflinching assessments. In prose she carried over the strengths and risks of her talk: incisive character sketches, moral seriousness veiled in jest, and a refusal to tidy the complications of feeling. To support household finances and to reach new readers, she lectured in the United States, where audiences responded to the combination of glamour, political proximity, and a mind that showed its workings.

Family and Friendships
Margot's family life remained the anchor of her middle and later years. Elizabeth, her daughter, married the Romanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco and wrote fiction and poetry; Anthony became a distinguished film director. Among her stepchildren, Violet Bonham Carter emerged as an influential Liberal orator and later a peer in her own right; Cyril rose to the highest ranks of the judiciary; Herbert wrote poetry and served in the war; Arthur was a decorated officer. These lives, so different yet bound by shared loyalties, kept Margot in ceaseless conversation with changing Britain. She remained in contact with former political allies and opponents, including Churchill, even as the old Liberal Party dwindled. The Souls were long dispersed, but their standards of friendship, talk, and irony stayed with her.

Later Years and Legacy
Widowed in 1928, Margot continued to write and to appear on public platforms, defending her husband's record and the best of Edwardian liberalism. She could be impetuous and was sometimes faulted for indiscretion, yet her candor preserved a textured record of an age that often preferred smooth surfaces. She died in 1945, having outlived the political world in which she had once been a reigning presence. Posterity remembers her not only as the wife of a Prime Minister but as a writer whose pages teem with living people: Balfour and Curzon at their ease, Churchill on the make, Lloyd George in the foreground of crisis, and, above all, the Asquith and Tennant families navigating public duty and private loss. Margot's legacy lies in that combination of intimacy and history, a witness's eye and a participant's nerve, the special gift of a woman who made conversation into a craft and then turned that craft into literature.

Our collection contains 13 quotes who is written by Margot, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - War - Wealth - Humility.