The Langhorne Sisters Book

When women were hardly allowed to have lives of their own, the pursuit of husbands was all important; sisters hunted as a pack. Nancy Astor, the first woman MP, was spectacular in her own right, but even more remarkable when seen as one of a quintet of high-spirited, often rackety Virginian sisters who cut a swathe through the snobbish Anglo-American society of the last years before World War I. Irene was literally an icon of the time, acting as prototype for her husband Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girls. Nancy fought off myriad rich and well-born suitors to marry Waldorf Astor, who adored her enough to take a back seat to her social and political ambitions. Nora ran away from the austere Kerr to the more congenial Lefty, with whom she cheered up a dying Scott Fitzgerald. Phyllis, Fox's grandmother, married Brand, the Empire's key policy wonk. Nancy stretched the mould of hostess, turning cartwheels through Cliveden, and invented an idiosyncratic Conservative feminism, working for women in Parliament on her own terms. This is a powerful story of women who played, mostly, by the rules, but managed to end as their own women, rather than just as wives. --Roz KaveneyRead More