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A House Full of Daughters

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A House Full of Daughters

By: Juliet Nicolson
Narrated by: Julie Teal
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About this listen

***As read on BBC Radio 4***

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, her mother’s Tory-conventional background.

But then Juliet, a renowned 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-siècle Washington DC, 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, the past – and, above all, love. It brings with it messages of truth and hope for us all.

 Women

Critic Reviews

Shocking and brave... Nicolson's anger, tenderness and insight have resulted in an exceptionally moving book (Miranda Seymour)
I couldn't put it down... Enthralling, touching and beautifully written (Joanna Lumley)
Original and illuminating… A House Full of Daughters gallops through seven generations with confidence and ease: it is funny in parts, painful in others but always honest. (Andrea Wulf)
Tense, highly personal and beautifully written... A powerful and moving family portrait (Christena Appleyard)
Candid, poignant, well-written and wonderfully life-affirming (Sebastian Shakespeare)
The most enjoyable book to take on holiday would undoubtedly be Juliet Nicolson’s A House Full of Daughters . It combines history with memoir in a way that both historians and memoirists should envy (Lady Antonia Fraser)
In prose that is lyrical and sometimes self-lacerating, she anatomises the failures of love and attention, none the less destructive for being inadvertent, from which these husbands, wives, parents and children, suffered so acutely … Lent grace by Nicolson’s lustrous prose, and by the redemptive hope that love and forgiveness will free the latest generations from the baleful patterns of the past. (Jane Shilling)
A marvelous writer, with a wonderful eye for detail
Wonderful (Mark Mason)
Nicolson’s aim in her meditative contribution to Nicolson studies is not so much to chronicle…as to search for patterns in the intergenerational weave… A fascinating social document. (D.J. Taylor)
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