Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure

Joyce Grenfell was born Joyce Phipps, daughter of the youngest of the beautiful American Langhorne sisters, of whom the most celebrated was Nancy, Lady Astor.

Her girlhood, spent on the fringes of the famous Cliveden set among such men as George Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward, spanned the twenties, but it was not until 1938, at a dinner party, that she gave an impromptu imitation of a Women’s Institute speaker and discovered her genius for dramatic monologue.

This book is the first part of her autobiography and takes the story from her childhood through the war, to the moment in 1954 when her own show, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure, opened in London. ‘Funny, oddly touching as well as heart-warming...

Miss Grenfell is a born writer’ – Daily Mail ‘With her book, Joyce Grenfell not only requests the pleasure, she gives it’ – Daily Telegraph ‘Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure does for a girlhood in the twenties what books like Gwen Raverat’s “Period Piece” or Joan Evans’s “Prelude and Fugue” did for an earlier generation. Like those classics of childhood recollection, it is vivid, evocative, bathed in warm clear light and packed with the kind of curious lore one could pick up nowhere else.’ – Observer Review