What do You think about Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa, And Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 (1995)?
Aristocrats it’s a biography centered around the lives of the Lennox sisters, but it is also a succesful portrait of a certain political and aristocratic sphere from the second half of the 18th century in the UK. Grand-daughters of one of the illegitimate sons of Charles II with Louise de Kérouaille, Cecilia (1723-1774), Emily (1731-1814), Louisa (1743-1821) and Sarah (1745-1826), proved that women could have as interesting lives as any man.What is more appealing of these sisters lives is not only the series of events they lived through, but the fact that they remained friends they whole lives. Despite having been wives and mothers for decades, they still considered themselves Lennox sisters in their old age. Together for the best and the worst, but also harshly judged by their bad decisions and stranged because of family disputes or politics, they confied in each other for everything, having an unusual close relationship. However, hierarchy is always present in terms of age (Caroline is Lady Holland and Emily Lenster, for the younger Louisa —the one in the cover— and Sarah) and character (Louisa is the shoulder all of them go always to cry on). The author captures the humanity in them by interpreting their faults as well as their virtues: Caroline is sensible and literate, but also pessimist and irrational when it comes to love; Emily is smart and fashionable, but extremelly narcissist and sly; Louisa, full of goodness, is sometimes the most weak and judgemental; Sarah, fun and passionate, is weak and self-deprecating — I’d say they are, respectively, Ravenclaw, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Gryffindor.The book never gets boring, Tillyard offers new information in every sentence: political, economical, ideological or simply personal. There is no doubt of the amount of research that was necessary to wrote it, but if we take a look at the sources and bibliography we’ll realize that it was extremely vast: from personal journals, newspapers, and letters the sisters wrote to each other, to letters of their labourers or people who only knew them from afar. The author learns their euphemisms, their double meanings and their codes (during the censorhip at the Irish revolution), and explains it to us making the characters more human and bizarre at the same time.It is not an easy reading, requires concentration and to keep cheching the family trees and portraits, but luckily, the book provides us with them. It is not boring in at any moment, though, and the hunger to know more about these character increases in every page. There are also many interesting secondary characters, that either I already knew or wish now to know more, like Horace Walpole, Susan Fox-Strangways, Kitty Fisher, Charles James Fox, Edward Fitzgerald, Charles Grey… I would abolutely recommend it t anyone interested in the Georgian era or, really, the complexities of the human character. And it provides you with a lot of trivia, very useful at parties (so they say).
—Marina
This is the story of four daughters of the second Duke of Richmond. Great-granddaughters of King Charles II, wealthy, titled, and intimate with the political leaders of the realm, the Lennox sisters were envied by many and watched by all. Their story lasts almost a century; it "begins in 1744, as the Jacobites were planning their last, desperate assault on the Hanoverian throne, and ends in 1832, five years before the beginning of the Victorian Age." The eldest, Caroline, eloped and became a rich and famous political hostess. Her eldest son was a dissolute wastral; her second son, Charles Fox, became an infamous politician. The second girl, Emily, married the Duke of Leinster, the first peer of Ireland. After their parents' deaths, Emily raised her much younger sisters Louisa and Sarah amidst her own gigantic brood (she had, in all, 22 children, only half of whom survived to adulthood). Emily arranged a marriage for Louisa to the richest man in Ireland, Thomas Conolly. King George III loved young Sarah, but was convinced to marry a German princess for matters of state. Sarah was pushed into a marriage with Thomas Bunbury, a man of little sense, money, or desire for his teenaged bride. Their marriage was deeply unhappy, and Sarah had a very public affair, forcing Bunbury to separate and eventually divorce her. She and Emily each remarried later in life, and had very happy marriages to men of significantly less money and social standing. Every sister but Louisa had a cavalcade of children. And every sister maintained a long, intimate relationship via letters. Thanks to those letters, and Tillyard's incredible scholarship, the modern age has a pretty good idea of their personalities and daily lives. The sisters themselves are vividly drawn and oft quoted (I'm a sucker for reading the actual words of historical figures), but what truly impressed me was the detail of their surroundings. How their servants were treated, what kind of decorating was in style, how one behaved in Bath, what London was like (the description of London "waking up" every morning was particularly impressive)...Tilyard assembles all this flotsom and arranges it into a coherent world.
—Wealhtheow
"Remember the Ladies!", as Abigail Adams once enjoined her husband - but so often of course history fails to. All of these women played significant roles in Georgian history, but at most they are footnotes in their lives of their male relatives - the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of Leinster, Lord Holland, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Charles James Fox. History remembers these names, but not those of Sarah, Emily, Louise and Sarah Lennox.So this book was an absolute joy to read. Stella Tillyard delves into the sisters' lives in great depth and you really feel as though you have come to know, come to appreciate and understand their personalities, their hopes and fears, their whims and quirks. All four sisters (there was a fifth, Cecilia, who died a nineteen, and a number of deceased infant siblings) led fascinating lives, often full of scandal and independence - dalliances with royalty, affairs, illegitimate children, second marriages. They were all striking personalities and every page of this book in their company was a pleasure, from Caroline who defied her family to marry the man she loved; Emily, who established herself as the steady matriarch of the family; gentle loving Louisa who held the family together; wilful impetuous Sarah, who captured a king's heart, left her husband for another man, married yet another.Whilst the Lennox sisters are of course the primary focus of this book, Tillyard doesn't skirt over the affairs of the age or the doings of the sisters' more active male kin. This was the era of George III, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Charles James Fox and William Pitt in Westminster, a turbulent era teetering on the brink of revolution at home and rebellion in Ireland. All of the sisters were interested in politics and their letters are full of actions and opinions, often discordant and divisive.I could hardly put this down. It's a truly excellent book and I would advise it to anyone who is interested in Georgian history, women's history, the lives of the aristocracy - hell, anyone who is interested in history, full stop!
—Caroline
