A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin - Softcover

Flanders, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393343103 ISBN 13: 9780393343106

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

A Circle of Sisters The MacDonald sisters started life in the lower-middle classes, denied the advantages of education and the expectation of social advancement. Yet, as wives and mothers, they connected a famous painter, a president of the Royal Academy, a prime minister, and the uncrowned poet laureate of the Empire.

About this title

Review:

Circle of Sisters is a new collective biography of the four Macdonald sisters, two of whom married the famous painters Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter, while the other two married Lockwood Kipling and Alfred Baldwin and produced between them a poet laureate and a prime minister. The daughters of a Methodist preacher, the four sisters led diverse and cosmopolitan lifestyles by Victorian standards, even if they remained throughout the subordinate siblings and partners of their menfolk. The story of the Macdonald family has been told before--notably in Ina Taylor's Victorian Sisters (1987--and although Flanders' account is better written, with more colour and detail, and with a finer appreciation of both the Macdonald forebears and the upbringing of the four girls, the book does not really live up to its billing. The author promises a book about private women, domestic life and the rhythms of family, subjects on which some of the best Victorian historians around have been working for a generation--for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in their influential Family Fortunes (1986). But we do not really get this. Circle of Sisters becomes too easily a conventional account of famous fathers and sons (Rudyard Kipling gets more space than Alice his mother). It is readable and undemanding biography, but hardly amounts to challenging history. We simply never learn enough about what made the sisters tick as daughters, wives or mothers. --Miles Taylor

Review:

"Drive[s] a four-horse chariot through the nineteenth century.... I have enjoyed this book more than I can say."

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393343103
• ISBN 13: 9780393343106
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432