Five Sisters
The Langhornes of Virginia
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The author of the bestseller White Mischief tells the story of the beautiful Langhorne sisters, who lived at the Pinnacle of high and powerful society from the end of the Civil War through the Second World War. Making their way across two continents, they left in their wakes rich husbands, fame, adoration, and scandal.
Lizzie, Irene, Nancy, Phyllis, and Nora were born in Virginia to a family impoverished by the Civil War. Their father remade his fortune by collaborating with the Yankees and building rail-roads; the sisters became southern belles and northern debutantes. James Fox draws on unpublished correspondence between the sisters and their husbands, lovers, children, and the powerful and glamorous of their day to construct a plural topography with the scope of a grand novel and the pace of a historical thriller.
At its center is the most famous sister, Nancy, who married Waldorf Astor, one of the richest men in the world. Heroic, hilarious, magnetically charming, and a bully, Lady Astor became Britain's first female MP, championing women's rights and the poor. The beautiful Irene married Charles Dana Gibson and was the model for the Gibson Girl. The author's grandmother, Phyllis, married a famous economist, one of the architects of modern Europe.
Fox has written an absorbing and spirited, intimate and sweeping account of extraordinary women at the highest reaches of society, their adventures set against the background of a tumultuous century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beginning in the genteel poverty of post- Civil War Richmond, Va., transformed by Langhorne pere's belated success as a railroad tycoon, the Langhorne sisters' trajectories spanned the upper reaches of Anglo-American society. The oldest, Lizzie, remained within the confines of Richmond's narrow-minded aristocracy; the next, Irene, identified by Fox without explanation as "the last great Southern Belle," married Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl; the third, Nancy, became Lady Astor and the first woman elected to the British Parliament (1919); the fourth, Phyllis, married Robert Brand, a brilliant civil servant once dubbed "the wisest man in the Empire;" the fifth, Nora, a perennial embarrassment and pathological liar, nonetheless inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to sober up temporarily during the last desperate phase of his life. Ideally, their story could illuminate the strengths and limitations of the aristocratic milieu these women arose from and partly refashioned, when juxtaposed with the broadest imaginable array of outside influences they encountered, while also providing an engrossing portrait of remarkable individuals, clashing in multiple ways with norms as well as stereotypes of their times. Instead, readers are shortchanged and will be put off by an excessive focus on Lady Astor (Lizzie and Irene are almost totally ignored, Phyllis plays second fiddle and Nora left field) and an overemphasis on drearily repetitive aspects of dysfunctional family life (while crucial aspects of social context are left unexplained), as if the author, a grandson of Phyllis (and author of the bestselling White Mischief), were still trying to exorcise family ghosts. Fascinating hints abound, isolated episodes are brilliant, but repeated tragic blindness on the part of these five women, as related by Fox, readily blots out all else. Photos.
