Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations
House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations | Juliet Nicolson
5 posts | 5 read | 7 to read
A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable womenAll 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."
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
review
Verity
post image
Mehso-so

This has been sitting on my currently reading lost in goodreads so long that I felt obliged to finish it, even though I care to dislike (or worse) pretty much all the women in it. I was interested in Vita - and want to read more about her and her set - but I found this exasperating in the main. Glad I decided to blitz it today and get it finished.

rubyslippersreads Gorgeous cover, but I'm disappointed to hear it was only so-so for you, since it's on my TBR list. 7y
Verity @rubyslippersreads it‘s so pretty isn‘t it? I was disappointed not to like it more too, but a lot of the women aren‘t very sympathetic and, maybe because it‘s her family, the author skates over some of the more dubious behaviour. 7y
24 likes2 comments
blurb
emilyesears
post image

My March reading has not been quite as prodigious as I would like (started binge-watching That '70s Show again which sucked up a lot of the weekend), but I finally finished a book! This memoir details the women in Juliet Nicholson's family, going from her great great grandma to her granddaughter. I found it engaging, but almost all of the mother-daughter relationships discussed were negative. A depressing book in some ways.

21 likes1 stack add
review
caitfish4311
Bailedbailed

I would have liked more info about Vita Sackville-West. Instead, the author dedicates the most room to her life and that of her mother. While this is kind of understandable, it wasn't enough to keep me interested.

review
Pierke
post image
Pickpick



Honest account of 7 generations of women in the writer‘s family. Among them Pepita and Vita Sackville-West. The candid recounting of her parents ‘lonely‘ marriage and the writer‘s struggle with alcoholism and motherhood made the book not only revealing but utterly unputdownable.

blurb
Rhondareads
post image

Seven generations of women.Historian Juliet Nicholson studied the myths&realities of her own family .

autumnprivett Ooo. Intriguing. 9y
14 likes2 stack adds1 comment