{"id":6734,"date":"2016-12-08T06:04:35","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T06:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6734"},"modified":"2016-12-09T12:44:18","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T12:44:18","slug":"a-house-full-of-daughters-by-juliet-nicolson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6734","title":{"rendered":"A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Chatto & Windus UK\/Farrar, Straus and Giroux US
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

336pp, hardback, \u00a316.99\/$26<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Jessica Mann<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is the story of seven generations of women, beginning with a girl born in the slums of Malaga in 1830.\u00a0 As the dancer \u2018Pepita\u2019 she became famous throughout nineteenth-century Europe. A youthful marriage, with no divorce permitted, prevented her from marrying her lover, the diplomat Lionel Sackville West, an English aristocrat with whom she had several children. She died when the eldest, Victoria, was only eight years old. There follows the biography of Victoria, who was her father\u2019s hostess when he was posted to Washington, and at home in his great house, Knole. In the next generation, Victoria\u2019s daughter was Vita Sackville West, and any reader who has been interested in the Bloomsbury group will \"\"<\/a>be only too familiar with her biography.<\/p>\n

Vita never got over the cruel fact that a woman could not inherit Knole. \u00a0Expelled from this paradise on her father\u2019s death, Vita and her husband Harold Nicolson created something equally beautiful at Sissinghurst. Their son Nigel was Juliet\u2019s father, and the final generations described are Juliet\u2019s own, her daughters\u2019, and her grand-daughter\u2019s.<\/p>\n

This beautifully written history is the kind of \u2018herstory\u2019 that, in the 1970s, women fighting for equality demanded.\u00a0 But it is also a remarkably candid personal memoir of the author\u2019s own and her mother\u2019s life. She does not hesitate to reveal that her grandfather, Harold Nicolson, was a snob, an anti-Semite and a racist; that her father, Nigel, married despite his lifelong conviction that sex was \u00a0\u2018nasty, something one was obliged to do only occasionally, almost like going to the loo\u2019. He was uninterested in sex, his wife Philippa was uninterested in Nigel\u2019s occupations, politics and writing. More importantly, \u2018My poor unloved mother had herself never learned how to love.\u2019<\/p>\n

Divorced from Nigel, Philippa married a millionaire who was \u2018soft and dangerous\u2019. She had Mediterranean holidays with friends who were so rich that a member of the crew would swim alongside their guests, holding an umbrella up high in order to protect sensitive English skin. She went to race meetings, and she drank. Juliet\u2019s candour about her mother\u2019s alcohol addiction, and later on, about her own, is admirable though startling.\u00a0 \u2018I resolved to write about my own secret only after consulting those who had been hurt most by my drinking.\u2019<\/p>\n

She is equally candid about her relationship with her two daughters and her beloved granddaughter. Unlike her wretched mother, Juliet Nicolson has learnt how to love. As for learning how to write: that ability seems to be inherited. She has as easy and elegant a style as her many writer relations, so this book is seductively readable. It could be described as a late addition to the \u2018Bloomsbury\u2019 shelves, but that should not put off anyone who feels enough has been said about that particular group. I found it touching and fascinating.<\/p>\n

In admitting that Nigel Nicolson was a friend, I can say with confidence that he would have been painfully proud of his daughter\u2019s candid confession.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*A 2016 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Jessica Mann<\/p>\n

This beautifully written history is the kind of \u2018herstory\u2019 that, in the 1970s, women fighting for equality demanded. But it is also a remarkably candid personal memoir of the author\u2019s own and her mother\u2019s life. She does not hesitate to reveal that her grandfather, Harold Nicolson, was a snob, an anti-Semite and a racist; that her father, Nigel, married despite his lifelong conviction that sex was \u2018nasty, something one was obliged to do only occasionally, almost like going to the loo\u2019 […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6734"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6749,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6734\/revisions\/6749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}