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Juliet Gardiner is a British author, editor, commentator and historian of British social history from Victorian times through to the post WWII era. She read history at University College, London, where she was awarded the Meyer Prize as a first class honours finalist in 1976, and failed to finish a PhD. In her autobiography Gardiner writes that she was born as "Olivia" to an unmarried mother from Italy. At the age of two she was adopted by a Hemel Hempstead sanitary inspector named Charles Wells and his wife Dolly. Her new parents renamed her "Gillian". On 18 February 1961, she married George Gardiner, a British Conservative Party politician and journalist. During the next couple of years she stopped being "Gillian" and became "Juliet". She would later describe being married to a Conservative politician as being "like a vicar's wife who doesn't believe in God". There were three children, but in 1980 the marriage ended in divorce.