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

Flanders, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670886734 ISBN 13: 9780670886739

Publisher: Viking, 2001

Synopsis

Behind every great man is a great woman... A CIRCLE OF SISTERS tells the story of the Macdonald women who became the wives of Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter and the mothers to Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling. This book traces their development from young women to wives and mothers of the British Establishment. Describing their childhood in Birmingham and the Macdonald's move to the filthy, busy London of the 1850s, Flanders paints a detailed picture of a domestic world full of incident and accident, thrown into relief against the wider context of Victorian and Edwardian society.

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: Viking
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0670886734
• ISBN 13: 9780670886739
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416