A House Full of Daughters, Juliet Nicolson
A House Full of Daughters, Juliet Nicolson
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A House Full of Daughters

Author: Juliet Nicolson

Narrator: Julie Teal

Unabridged: 9 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/14/2016


Synopsis

A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable women

All 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.

About Juliet Nicolson

Juliet Nicolson is the author of The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm and The Great Silence: Britain From the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age. She has two daughters and lives with her husband in Sussex, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Penny on April 27, 2016

I've read two history books by Juliet Nicolson and enjoyed them both, so I was pretty confident I would enjoy this family memoir Nicolson starts her book with the story of her great, great grandmother, the very lowly born Spanish dancer Pepita, and then works through 7 generations of the female line......more

Goodreads review by Claire on July 30, 2016

I loved this sweep through history told through the singular lives of the women of the author's family. Each woman's life is described in just a couple of chapters, so that I never found myself getting too bored by mundane details. Juliet Nicolson does a wonderful job of placing these women in their......more