A House Full of Daughters

A House Full of Daughters

by JulietNicolson (Author)

Synopsis

This is selected as a Book of the Year in the Telegraph & the Lady. As read on BBC Radio 4. All families have their myths and legends. For many years Juliet Nicolson accepted hers - the dangerous beauty of her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother's Tory-conventional background. But then Juliet, a renowned historian, started to question. As she did so, she sifted fact from fiction, uncovering details and secrets long held just out of sight. A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siecle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, the knife-edge that was New York City in the 1980s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from. A House Full of Daughters is one woman's investigation into the nature of family, memory, the past - and, above all, love. It brings with it messages of truth and hope for us all.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Edition: 1st Edition.
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 24 Mar 2016

ISBN 10: 0701189304
ISBN 13: 9780701189303
Book Overview: What effect does the past really have on the present? Historian Juliet Nicolson sets out to uncover her family's past, and makes significant discoveries about herself in the process

Media Reviews
Shocking and brave... Nicolson's anger, tenderness and insight have resulted in an exceptionally moving book -- Miranda Seymour Daily Telegraph I couldn't put it down... Enthralling, touching and beautifully written -- Joanna Lumley Original and illuminating... A House Full of Daughters gallops through seven generations with confidence and ease: it is funny in parts, painful in others but always honest. -- Andrea Wulf Guardian Tense, highly personal and beautifully written... A powerful and moving family portrait -- Christena Appleyard Literary Review Candid, poignant, well-written and wonderfully life-affirming -- Sebastian Shakespeare Tatler The most enjoyable book to take on holiday would undoubtedly be Juliet Nicolson's A House Full of Daughters . It combines history with memoir in a way that both historians and memoirists should envy -- Lady Antonia Fraser Observer Best Holiday Reads 2016 In prose that is lyrical and sometimes self-lacerating, she anatomises the failures of love and attention, none the less destructive for being inadvertent, from which these husbands, wives, parents and children, suffered so acutely ... Lent grace by Nicolson's lustrous prose, and by the redemptive hope that love and forgiveness will free the latest generations from the baleful patterns of the past. -- Jane Shilling Evening Standard A marvelous writer, with a wonderful eye for detail New York Times Book Review Wonderful -- Mark Mason Daily Mail Nicolson's aim in her meditative contribution to Nicolson studies is not so much to chronicle...as to search for patterns in the intergenerational weave... A fascinating social document. -- D.J. Taylor The Times Surprisingly affecting... impressively understated... remarkably sad -- Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times This is a book about how a family survives emotional dramas and difficulties down the generations, and at what cost... Not long ago such difficulties used not to be spoken, much less written about; Nigel Nicolson himself, in 1974, took one of the first steps in breaking that taboo... His daughter now takes honesty about family matters much further. In writing this highly entertaining account, she shows exceptional emotional resilience -- Anne Chisholm Spectator Brilliant, incisive exploration of seven generations of women... A riveting read... This is an elegantly written meditation on family, identity and the impact of the past. -- Juanita Coulson Lady In historian Juliet Nicolson's story of seven generations of her family, it's refreshing to find the women take centre stage... for so many generations, the birth of a daughter was a disappointment, but Nicolson redresses the balance -- Charlotte Heathcote Sunday Express Poignant and courageous Sunday Telegraph This is Juliet Nicolson's own truth, courageously shared -- Victoria Glendinning Oldie Strikingly lucid, brave and generous -- Sue Gaisford Tablet This is the mesmerising, seven-generations saga of the strong women in Juliet Nicolson's family -- Iain Finlayson Saga Magazine Alongside vivid portraits of Pepita, Victoria and Vita, Nicolson delivers a magnificently clear-eyed view of her mother... Lovely, elegant book, painstakingly unsentimental. -- Nick Curtis Radio Times She examines the pride, passion, resentment, emotional neglect, addiction and loss, and recognizes them in her own life... a treat Psychologies
Author Bio
Juliet Nicolson is the author of two works of history, The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War and The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911, and a novel, Abdication. As the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and the daughter of Nigel Nicolson she is part of a renowned and much scrutinised family and the latest in the family line of record-keepers of the past. She lives with her husband in East Sussex, not far from Sissinghurst, where she spent her childhood. She has two daughters, Clemmie and Flora, and one grand-daughter, Imogen.