Five Sisters

February 28, 2000
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.