Five Sisters

London Observer [Five Sisters] is not just a study of a family, or of an age, it is a living, breathing re-creation of a singular way of life....Fox has done more than create a monument to his family -- he has captured a fading impression and made it flow. The Langhornes are alive again.

Autorentext

James Fox was born in Washington, D.C., in 1945. He worked as a journalist in Africa, and later at the Sunday Times in London. He is the author of the bestselling White Mischief.

Klappentext

The author of the bestselling "White Mischief" tells the story of the beautiful Langhorne sisters who lived at the center of high and powerful society from the end of the Civil War through World War II. of photos.

Zusammenfassung
The beautiful Langhorne sisters lived at the pinnacle of society from the end of the Civil War through the Second World War. Born in Virginia to a family impoverished by the Civil War, Lizzie, Irene, Nancy, Phyllis, and Nora eventually made their way across two continents, leaving rich husbands, fame, adoration, and scandal in their wake.
At the center of the story is Nancy, who married Waldorf Astor, one of the richest men in the world. Heroic, hilarious, magnetically charming, and a bully, Nancy became Britain's first female MP. The beautiful Irene married Charles Dana Gibson and was the model for the Gibson Girl. Phyllis, the author's grandmother, married a famous economist, one of the architects of modern Europe. Author James Fox draws on the sisters' unpublished correspondence to construct an intimate and sweeping account of five extraordinary women at the highest reaches of society.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: The Langhornes

The Langhorne sisters of Virginia were a phenomenon in America, in the South and then in the North, long before the third of Chillie Langhorne´s five daughters crossed the Atlantic and became, as Nancy Astor, in 1919, the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament. For a decade or two after that, she was probably the most famous woman in the world. Nancy, in turn, had grown up in the shadow of her elder sister Irene. It was Irene who had first projected the sisterhood into the public imagination when she emerged in 1890 in Virginia, aged seventeen, as the last great Southern Belle; two years later, she was the first to go north since the Civil War, to lead the debutante balls. She married, in 1895, the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, into whose image Irene merged, thus achieving celebrity comparable now only in movie star or supermodel terms. Irene´s rise to fame coincided with the moment that Chillie Langhorne, the patriarch of this family, who was born into the old Virginian squirearchy, a class ruined -- like every other in Virginia -- by the war, made a sudden fortune on the railroads and rescued his family from twenty-five years of poverty and hardship in the years of Reconstruction.

Langhorne installed his family at Mirador, a colonnaded house at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the younger children, Nancy and her closest sister, Phyllis, Nora, and Buck, grew up. For the northern admirers who came down on the train to propose to Irene and to inspect this glamorous family, the setting was important in the Langhorne sisters´ myth. It was a long way from the overcrowded four-room bungalow in Danville, where most of them were born and spent their early childhood; or the dusty streets of funereal Richmond, where they had moved from one rented house to another. It was a sudden transformation -- and a rare one for Virginians at the time.

Nancy and, soon afterward, Phyllis, barely out of their teens, and both beauties to rival Irene, followed their elder sister north, encouraged by their father and their mother, Nanaire, to escape the poverty trap in Richmond. Both made disastrous first marriages to idle, hard-drinking northern millionaires, and both made their retreat from this further humiliation by the Yankees, across the Atlantic to England -- a place of "homecoming," as they saw it -- where Irene and Dana, on their grand tours, had already become assimilated into Edwardian royal circles. Nancy and Phyllis, both brilliant and fearless riders, shipped their horses from Virginia and first made their mark on English society on the hunting fields of Leicestershire. Within two years, having turned down many titled suitors, Nancy in 1906 married Waldorf Astor, whose father, William Waldorf Astor, had settled in England and who was considered then the richest man in the world. Later, Phyllis, who had taken longer to extract herself from her own first husband, married Bob Brand, Oxford scholar, economic expert, and intellectual, known since he was a young imperial civil servant as "The Wisest Man in the Empire."

Nancy and Phyllis found themselves in highly unpredictable circumstances, at the center of English politics and power, changing one vanishing world for another. But it was Nancy who drove the bandwagon, first by effortlessly conquering Edwardian society and the literary world and then by moving into politics from her base, with Waldorf, at Cliveden, their great house by the Thames. Under Nancy, even before the First World War, Cliveden had become a hothouse of political power that embraced both government and opposition, as well as Anglo-American intrigue.

Nora, the youngest, wayward sister, was in turn forced from Mirador and across the water to England by Nancy and Phyllis, who hoped to tame her with a good English marriage, under their supervision. She arrived after a series of romantic episodes that kept the family constantly on the edge of scandal, and that continued even more scandalously after her marriage. (Part of Nora´s claim on history, later on, was the fame of her daughter, the actress and comedienne Joyce Grenfell.) Of the sisters, only Lizzie, the eldest, born in 1867 soon after the war, who had married a Virginian, was left behind in this extraordinary exercise of mobility and transformation -- but she continued, from Richmond, to have her stern effect on the family. The Langhorne boys in the family, Keene, Harry, and the youngest child, Buck, were no match for their formidable sisters, to whom their father had been more lenient. Keene and Harry succumbed to tuberculosis at a young age, aggravated by alcohol and much time spent "spreeing" in the mountains, trying to get away from their father´s dominating control. Buck, a man of immense popularity in Virginia, survived these same afflictions for longer. He lived the pleasurable life of an eighteenth-century squire on a remote farm near the James River, "the only man I know," said his father, "who inherited a self running farm."

The lives of the Langhorne sisters spanned one hundred years, from the birth of Lizzie to the death of Nancy in 1964; from the end of the Civil War, through the traumas of Reconstruction, to Edwardian England; the politics and turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s, through the Second World War to the early 1960s. So enduring was the Langhorne sisters´ myth that when Irene visited the White House in April 1945, a few days before Roosevelt died, and forty years after Nancy had married Waldorf Astor, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column, "The younger members of the family were fascinated by her, because she is still the Gibson Girl of her husband´s drawings; and though some of the youngsters had never heard of the Gibson Girl, they fell a victim to her charm of manner and beauty. All of the Langhorne sisters are people one has to notice!" The sisters left an exceptional legacy of correspondence -- many thousands of letters, most of which had lain in a large black trunk, barely disturbed since my grandfather, Bob Brand, husband of Phyllis, had collected them in the early 1950s, as part of the process of grief after Phyllis´s premature death. They tell the intimate st…