Clare Consuelo Sheridan (1885–1970), née Frewen, was a sculptor, journalist and novelist. She was also the cousin of Winston Churchill who, at the height of the Russian Civil War, travelled to Moscow to make busts of Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders – an action that made her a central figure in public discourse about the revolution. Sheridan was born into a rich family, but the family wealth collapsed due to bad investments, and her relatively poor husband was killed in action in 1915, leaving Sheridan with two children and a war pension of £250 per annum, which enabled her ‘to consider herself free to the end of her days’. Sheridan followed an independent feminist track, electing to work rather than remarry. She nevertheless had a series of male lovers and depended a great deal on her attractiveness to men – her biographer notes that she ‘maddened most women but to men, especially strong men who would carry out tasks useful to her, she had immense appeal and her sense of drama delighted them’. The theme of a woman's independence against the background of serial relationships with men recurs in Sheridan's novels, and her belief in and practice of free love came to be a key component in her sympathy for Bolshevism. To support her family, Sheridan became a professional sculptor, and established herself with busts of such eminent people as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, her cousin Winston, and the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, whose bust is still on display in the Oxford Union which commissioned it. Although evidently privileged, and able to make progress in her work through her connections, Sheridan was nevertheless an example of a woman who had suffered, as had many, from the loss of her husband in the war, and had made a virtue of her independence, rather than throw herself into the fight for a wealthy husband. It was her special brand of independence, though, and her desire to be as famous as her eminent cousin, which put her at the centre of a political and personal storm.