A House Full of Daughters

Starred review from April 18, 2016
British writer Nicolson (The Great Silence: 1918–1920; Living in the Shadow of the Great War), skillfully recounts the journeys of the women in her family. She begins her chronicle in 1830 with the fascinating story of her great-great-grandmother, a famous dancer from the slums of Southern Spain, and takes readers on an intimate tour of her female relatives, explaining that for all the differences in personalities, time, and place, these individuals all share one thing: “We are all daughters.” Writing from a beach in the Hebrides, Nicolson concludes with her musings on how life will be different for her one-year old granddaughter. Nicolson had plenty of raw material from which to craft her remarkable story; many of her relatives wrote down their history. She is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and the daughter of author Nigel Nicolson, probably the most recognizable of her family members for American readers. Even the less familiar relatives’ stories make for fascinating reading in this intimate and well-written family history.

May 1, 2016
Nicolson (Abdication, 2012, etc.) traces seven generations of women connected to the Sackville Wests. Beginning with her great-great-grandmother Pepita Duran (1830-1871), the flamenco dancer known as the Star of Andalusia, and her doting, if not smothering, mother, the author follows the relationship between mothers and daughters through the generations. Once diplomat Lionel Sackville-West fell under Pepita's spell, she rejected her mother and lived as his mistress. She adored her illegitimate children despite being ostracized from polite society, including Lionel's. When she died in childbirth in Arcachon, near Bordeaux, the children were scattered, until Lionel needed a hostess for his posting to the United States. His daughter Victoria stepped in and was a brilliant addition, winning her way into the society surrounding the estate at Knole. She married her cousin, who would inherit the estate, and the difficult birth of Vita ended any semblance of happiness in the marriage. Vita and Harold's marriage was as happy as it was unconventional: both had lovers of the same sex, she more than he. Her son and daughter-in-law Philippa carried on the family, and Philippa extended the nonmaternal lines that had progressed through the years. This social history and story of family relationships is also the tale of Knole, the ancestral home, and its magnetic hold on those women. In the same light is the pull of Sissinghurst, the home bought by Vita and her husband, Harold, when she was unable, as a woman, to inherit Knole. The first half of the book portrays strong, if flawed, women, while the ending is more autobiographical and, while well-written, more cathartic than interesting. Readers interested in 19th- and early-20th-century society, especially that of the upper classes, will enjoy this picture of the privileged life, "where loyalty, respect and equality are all held in the highest regard."

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Starred review from June 1, 2016
Nicolson (The Perfect Summer, 2007) is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West, a British literary figure and a renowned gardener remembered best, on a more gossipy level, for her affair with Virginia Woolf. But Vita is simply one of the several remarkable women among Nicolson's forebears whom she portrays with her sensitive writerly skills and fortunate family habit of writing down the story of our lives as part of her reconstruction of the experiences of seven generations of women. As she moves forward, she succeeds in both fleshing out their individuality and establishing connective threads among them. It is a long journey between 1830 and 2015, which Nicolson accomplishes without any flagging of narrative tension. She takes the engrossed reader from nineteenth-century Spain and her great-great-grandmother Pepita, to Washington, D.C.'s postCivil War diplomatic community, to Edwardian glamour in England, WWII dangers, swinging London in the 1960s, New York City in the edgy 1980s, and back home to merry ole England in the current era. Nicolson's goal is to honestly chronicle her foremothers' lives, and her pursuit brings with it a vivid, personalized social history of Britain's upper class over the past century.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2016

Every family has its myths, but pay attention here as noted historian Nicholson decides to pick apart those of her family--her mother was Vita Sackville-West. Nicholson turns her considerable skills toward assessing seven generations of women in her family, including flamenco-passionate great-great-grandmother Pepita and seductive great-grandmother Victoria, and comes up with some troubling patterns of behavior she sees echoing in her own life.

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