The Women of Rothschild
The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Dynasty
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'Captivating, intimate, dazzling epic and revelatory' SIMON SEBAG-MONTEFIORE
The story of the family who rose from the Frankfurt ghetto to become synonymous with wealth and power has been much mythologized. Yet half the Rothschilds, the women, remain virtually unknown.
From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the English branch of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty first.
As Jews in a Christian society and women in a deeply patriarchal family, they were outsiders. Determined to challenge and subvert expectations, they supported each other, building on the legacies of their mothers and aunts. They became influential hostesses and talented diplomats, choreographing electoral campaigns, advising prime ministers, advocating for social reform and trading on the stock exchange. Misfits and conformists, conservatives and idealists, performers and introverts, they mixed with Rossini and Mendelssohn, Disraeli, Gladstone and Chaim Weizmann, amphetamine-dealers, temperance campaigners, Queen Victoria, and Albert Einstein. They broke code, played a pioneering role in the environmental movement, scandalised the world of women's tennis by introducing the overarm serve and drag-raced with Miles Davies in Manhattan.
Absorbing and compulsive THE WOMEN OF ROTHSCHILD gives voice to the complicated, privileged and gifted women whose vision and tenacity shaped history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Livingstone (The Mistresses of Cliveden) delivers a comprehensive and colorful group biography of the women of the Rothschild dynasty. The family tree begins with matriarch Gutle Schnapper (1753–1849), whose dowry enabled her husband, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, to start building the family's banking empire. The mother of five boys and five girls, Gutle's female descendants spread across Europe, hobnobbing with prime ministers and celebrities, lobbying popes and rabbis for social reform, and even breaking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park. The most recent generations profiled include entomologist Miriam Rothschild (1908–2005), known the "Queen of Fleas"; her sister Nica (1913–1988), a patron of jazz musicians including Thelonious Monk; and her daughter Rosie (1945–2010), a psychotherapist and feminist art historian. Livingstone expertly mines diaries, memoirs, and letters for vivid anecdotes, including Miriam's description of her and her siblings' romantic suitors as "erotic appendages," and illuminates how her subjects pushed back against anti-Semitism and their family's "male culture" to take their place in the world. This sparkling history is full of riches.
