A House Full Of Daughters

Description

All families have their myths and Juliet Nicolson's was no different: her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother's Tory-conventional background. 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 DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, 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.

Awards

Shortlisted for Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2016.

Reviews

"Shocking and brave... Nicolson's anger, tenderness and insight have resulted in an exceptionally moving book" -- Miranda Seymour Daily Telegraph "I couldn't put it down... Enthralling, touching and beautifully written" -- Joanna Lumley "Original and illuminating... A House Full of Daughters gallops through seven generations with confidence and ease: it is funny in parts, painful in others but always honest." -- Andrea Wulf Guardian "Tense, highly personal and beautifully written... A powerful and moving family portrait" -- Christena Appleyard Literary Review "Candid, poignant, well-written and wonderfully life-affirming" -- Sebastian Shakespeare Tatler

Author description

Juliet Nicolson is the author of two works of history, The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War and The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911, and a novel, Abdication. As the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and the daughter of Nigel Nicolson she is part of a renowned and much scrutinised family and the latest in the family line of record-keepers of the past. She lives with her husband in East Sussex, not far from Sissinghurst, where she spent her childhood. She has two daughters, Clemmie and Flora, and one grand-daughter, Imogen.