The Langhorne Sisters

Inscription on front endpage.

Drawn from the private family archive, this book recounts a family's dramatic reinvention and transformation on both sides of the Atlantic. All of the Langhorne sisters are people one has to notice, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt from the White House in 1945. This effect and their great fame held sway first in the South, in Virginia, then the rest of America and England. High spirited, beautiful, clannish and adored, these five strikingly different women were mythologized in the plural long after their separate careers were a matter of history. Lizzie was the strict, puritan eldest sister, Irene was the flirtatious and golden southern belle. Nancy was flamboyant and powerful, and, after a disastrous first marriage, launched herself first on the stuffy ruling classes of England and then the House of Commons as the first woman MP. The luminous and melancholy Phyllis was a brilliant horsewoman and the only person Nancy loved all through her life. Nora was the eternal child, her life punctuated with seductions and boltings. This exploration of family myth unravels the darker stories: the tragic lives of Nancy and Phyllis's children by their first marriages. Placing his great aunt Nancy and grandmother Phyllis at its heart, the book looks at how their past lives and mistakes in America came back to haunt them. Told in their own intimate voices, selected from thousands of letters and journals, the book charts the attempts of two extraordinary women to transform themselves and to build new lives, and the chain of events that would destroy their family lives and happiness....