A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations

Summary (from the publisher): 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.

Review: This biography/memoir traces seven generations of women in author Juliet Nicolson's family. From her great-great grandmother, a Spanish flamenco dancer named Pepita, to her infamous grandmother Vita Sackville-West through the author's own story and the still budding stories of her two daughters and young granddaughter, this story is full of strong personalities and the legacies inherited from the previous generations. 

Nicolson's family tree is absolutely bursting was eccentric characters, strong personalities, and name dropping of the rich and famous. For instance, the author's great-grandmother Victoria overcame the stigma of her illegitimate birth to become a celebrated young society woman in Washington D.C. as a companion of her diplomat father. She refused numerous proposals of marriage, including one from President Chester Arthur. And famously, her daughter Vita is still known today for her numerous love affairs, which included the author Virginia Woolf. I loved reading about the family history, including the fabulous descriptions of their family homes, such as Knole, "the Sackville family home for centuries. The calendar house is famous for its show-off statistics, incorporating 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, seven courtyards and thousands of windows" (74). 

While the early chapters of this novel read very much as biography, once the author reaches the chapters about her mother and then herself and her daughters, it transitions to much more of a memoir style of writing, full of reflections on her own feelings and experiences. The author does not shy away from sharing any of the intimate struggles of either her relatives or herself, which gives this book a an honest feel, full of flawed but fascinating characters. My one major complaint with this book is that many of the chapters ended very abruptly, with the next jumping forward in time to cover the next woman in the family line. Obviously it is impossible to provide comprehensive biographies of seven generations of women within one book, but many of the stories felt very incomplete and unfinished when Nicolson moved on to the next. 

Stars: 3