Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson - Available

A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson
Julie Teal
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable women

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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 14, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781524703905
      • File size: 284733 KB
      • Duration: 09:53:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Julie Teal's impeccable English tones are just right for this exploration of the women in one of England's most famous and eccentric families. Written by the great-great-granddaughter of the first person we meet, a Spanish flamenco dancer named Pepita, the audiobook explores the passions of the Sackville-West and Nicholson women across generations and countries, a family that included renowned garden designer Vita Sackville-West. They are a talented, often impossible group, and they make for a fascinating story. Teal's French and American pronunciations could have used some coaching, but the rest of her performance is excellent. She paces the history so that we are never lost, crisply navigates the web of names and places, and paints moving portraits of these smart, willful, and determined women. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 18, 2016
      British writer Nicolson (The Great Silence: 1918–1920; Living in the Shadow of the Great War), skillfully recounts the journeys of the women in her family. She begins her chronicle in 1830 with the fascinating story of her great-great-grandmother, a famous dancer from the slums of Southern Spain, and takes readers on an intimate tour of her female relatives, explaining that for all the differences in personalities, time, and place, these individuals all share one thing: “We are all daughters.” Writing from a beach in the Hebrides, Nicolson concludes with her musings on how life will be different for her one-year old granddaughter. Nicolson had plenty of raw material from which to craft her remarkable story; many of her relatives wrote down their history. She is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and the daughter of author Nigel Nicolson, probably the most recognizable of her family members for American readers. Even the less familiar relatives’ stories make for fascinating reading in this intimate and well-written family history.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading