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A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations - Inspiring True Story of Family Legacy & Women's Strength | Perfect for Book Clubs, Genealogy Enthusiasts & Feminist Readers
A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations - Inspiring True Story of Family Legacy & Women's Strength | Perfect for Book Clubs, Genealogy Enthusiasts & Feminist Readers

A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations - Inspiring True Story of Family Legacy & Women's Strength | Perfect for Book Clubs, Genealogy Enthusiasts & Feminist Readers

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Description

A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable womenAll 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 Sackville-West, her mother’s Tory-conventional background. But then Juliet, a distinguished 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 D.C., 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, and the past. As Juliet finds uncomfortable patterns reflected in these distant and more recent versions of herself, she realizes her challenge is to embrace the good and reject the hazards that have trapped past generations.

Reviews

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- Verified Buyer
Juliet Nicolson's heritage is highly literary. Sister, daughter,and granddaughter of acclaimed novelists, biographers,and historians, she is herself responsible for several excellent historical works. A Houseful of Daughters is her most personal work, an examination of her own ancestry. A descendant of generations of remarkable women, Nicolson here reveals herself to be just as remarkable.Nicolson's story begins in the nineteenth century with the calculating Catalina Ortega, an otherwise unaccomplished woman of no background who gave birth to the beautiful dancer Pepita Duran. Pepita blazed her way across Europe tantalizing nobility and royalty until she eventually met and fell in love with Lionel Sackville-West, a British diplomat with a distinguished family tree but a rather haphazard outlook on life. He and Pepita had a number of love children who were ineligible to inherit Lionel's wealth or title of Lord Sackville. Fortunately their eldest daughter, Victoria, married her first cousin, another Lionel Sackville-West who eventually inherited the title and the family estate of Knole. Their daughter was the celebrated Vita Sackville-West, a talented writer and notable eccentric who married the eminent historian Harold Nicolson and with him created the magnificent Sissinghurst gardens. Their son Nigel Nicolson married another bride with an aristocratic heritage, Philippa Tennyson d'Eyncourt, and they eventually became Juliet's parents. Juliet herself had a childhood influenced by her parents' marital troubles, made her own early marriage and gave birth to two daughters, then spent years dealing with alcolholism and other demons before finding fulfillment as a writer.This must have been a very painful, though perhaps cathartic as well, book to write. Juliet's troubled relationship with her mother is laid out in harrowing detail, and while she is less forthcoming about the troubles she had with her own daughters during her years of addiction, there are hints of some difficult times there as well. Juliet was very young when she lost her grandmother Vita, but the story of the Nicolsons' famously troubled marriage is all too well known. Her parents' final illnesses and deaths are dealt with bravely, something I and everyone else who has lost parents can appreciate. I finished A Houseful of Daughters with great respect and liking for Juliet, and I trust that she will favor us with many more books in years to come.