2022: Book 21 – A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson

A Houseful of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations by Juliet Nicolson Rating: ★★★½ Publication Date: March 24, 2016 Genre: memoir, non-fiction Pages: 326 ReRead?: No 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.

I read the first 60% of the book – all of the chapters that covered the generations between Pepita, Vita Sackville-West’s grandmother, and Philippa, Vita’s daughter. The author is her granddaughter and I was just getting to her chapters when I decided that I had read the parts that interested me. There was nothing wrong with the book – but I selected it for its connection to Vita Sackville-West, and the connection became increasingly attenuated.

I did find it interesting, and it gave me some additional insight into Vita Sackville-West. She came from a long line of flamboyant, talented and often self-involved women. None of them were maternal in the way that I think of maternal – I suspect that being their child resulted in a lot of emotional neglect, benign at best. If there can be benign neglect of a child, which I strongly doubt. But they were an intriguing bunch, who lived their lives, each of them, in ways that were very different from my personal version of middle-class upbringing.

I am very interested in the women who were associated with the Bloomsbury Group, and the feminist movement in England in the pre- and post-WWI era. I’m done with Vita for now, but I can definitely see revisiting her work in the future, or reading a full biography that focuses on her. I’m also interested in Sissinghurst and her skill as a horticulturist, which was also an important part of who she was and which I didn’t get into at all. I also, eventually, want to read Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, which may peripherally relate to Vita.

Anyway, this closes out my Vita Sackville-West project quite nicely, at least for now.