Amazon.com

I must confess that initially I tried to skim this book. But it was far too good, and I ended up spending hours totally engrossed in the lives, loves, and letters of the Lennox sisters--Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah. Author Stella Tillyard gives a second life to these 18th-century aristocrats, whose extended family included some of the most significant and colorful British political figures of the era. She mixes impeccable research, a sharp eye for detail, and a writing style that's both precise and lively to produce a biography of a clan that doubles as a panoramic history of the aristocracy in the 1700s.

Each sister's defining characteristics shine through her letters, portraits, and Tillyard's terrific storytelling. Caroline, the eldest, is deeply pessimistic, intelligent, and moral but fascinated by and attracted to "wickedness" (she eloped with the naughty-but-nice Henry Fox and lived happily ever after). Emily: beautiful, loving, dictatorial, and unbelievably fertile (22 children, 10 of whom survived into adulthood). Louisa was good, gentle, always unwilling to believe ill of anyone, and when she died, was mourned not only by family and friends, but also by the whole of the Irish town in which she lived. And Sarah--flighty, flirtatious Sarah, with whom the young King George III fell blushingly and tongue-tiedly in love. Who, after disgracing herself and her dull, uninterested husband with the moody younger brother of Lord Gordon (of Gordon riots fame), finally found happiness and respectability, in her late 30s, with an understanding soldier. Unmissable. --Lisa Gee, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

The world of 18th-century, upper-class England is brought vividly to life in this biography of the Duke of Richmond's four daughters. Historian Tillyard (The Impact of Modernism) has crafted an engrossing narrative based on the voluminous correspondence of the Lennox sisters. Caroline, the eldest, who eloped at 19, wrote weekly to her younger sister Emily, who married for love at 16, settled in Ireland and bore 19 children. The two younger sisters, Louisa and Sarah, left home for arranged marriages and shared their experiences through letters. Sarah scandalized society when she abandoned her husband for a lover. But Tillyard does more here than merely document. She mostly forgoes scholarly apparatus and instead calls on fictional strategies to bridge the chronological distance between readers and the Lennoxes. And she succeeds brilliantly in this highly readable cultural history. Photos not seen by PW.

Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

With an impressive amount of research, historian Tillyard brings alive in intimate detail the pampered elite in one period in English history. Her work tells the story of four sisters-Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox-noble-born members of a Georgian family. "After her month's confinement, Emily went through the sacramental ceremony of churching, when women were readmitted to the outside world after childbirth....[C]hurching brought women back into daily life. ...[A]fter churching came sex." Marriages, arranged and romantic, babies born and funerals endured-the full cycle of life is generously covered. For all the sisters' riches, there is an overtone of melancholy to much of their story, from the sad, orphan birth at the beginning to the last miserable, mindless end of Sarah Lennox. The author's understanding of the people and her care for scholarship make this a recommended purchase for larger public and academic libraries.

Katherine Gillen, Luke Air Force Base Lib., Ariz.

Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In a sparkling match of author and subject, the knowledgeable, talented Tillyard presents the lives of four particularly fascinating English women of the particularly colorful eighteenth century. These were the famous Lennox sisters, daughters of the second duke of Richmond. Each of the sisters was vivid in her own right, and each one's particular vividness springs to life as if Tillyard were an art historian restoring a painting to its original brilliance. But in telling their individual stories as they grew up privileged, married privileged men, and had physical and emotional problems that even privilege couldn't prevent, Tillyard's bigger picture is a finely woven tapestry of aristocratic life at this point in English history, indelibly immersing the reader in time and place. This compellingly, no, beautifully written, book will be an essential part of all active history collections. Brad Hooper --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Lyndall Gordon, The New York Times Book Review

A superb study of a remarkable family in eighteenth-century England that "leads us skillfully into the unseen spaces of women's lives."

Review

"A superb study of a remarkable family in eighteenth-century England that "leads us skillfully into the unseen spaces of women's lives." --Lyndall Gordon, The New York Times Book Review

"A work of such surpassing brilliance that it quite susps our disbelief, transports us to the center of an admittedly alien world and returns us to our own with a feeling of inner enlargement and change . . . Readers may expect a far more active, and personal, engagement with history than they are likely to have known before." --John Demos, The Boston Sunday Globe

Review

"A superb study of a remarkable family in eighteenth-century England that "leads us skillfully into the unseen spaces of women's lives." --Lyndall Gordon, The New York Times Book Review

"A work of such surpassing brilliance that it quite susps our disbelief, transports us to the center of an admittedly alien world and returns us to our own with a feeling of inner enlargement and change . . . Readers may expect a far more active, and personal, engagement with history than they are likely to have known before." --John Demos, The Boston Sunday Globe

Book Description

The Lennox Sisters--great-granddaughters of a king, daughters of a cabinet minister, and wives of politicians and peers--lived lives of real public significance, but the private texture of their family-centered world mattered to them and they shared their experiences with each other in countless letters. From this hitherto unknown archive, Stella Tillyard has constructed a group biography of privileged eighteenth-century women who, she shows, have much to tell us about our own time.

About the Author

Stella Tillyard was graduated from Oxford University. The author of The Impact of Modernism, a work that was awarded the Nicolaus Pevsner Memorial Prize, she has taught at U.C.L.A. and Harvard. She lives in London and Florence with her husband and two children.