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A House Full of Daughters

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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)
All stars
Most relevant
I thought I knew quite a lot about this family, having read about Vita and Harold in the past but this book, delightfully narrated, covers fresh ground. I was hooked from the start and missed my stop on the tube several times as I was so engrossed. Very touching and honest. Highly recommended!

Poignant and seductive

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This a wonderful biography of seven generations of daughters which ends with Juliet Nicolson's own daughters and granddaughter. The Sackville-West family history is well-documented already as so many of its members have been writers, but there has gathered over the generations also a fantastic treasure trove of diaries and letters for Juliet to draw on. What a gift for a biographer, and Juliet does it all full justice. The result is superb, filled with detail, understanding, honesty and insight into family relationships.

The stories start with the diplomat Lionel Sackville-West falling in love with the impossibly beautiful, married Spanish dancer Pepita in 1852 whom he kept hidden away with their five children in Arcachon in France. Their eldest (illegitimate) daughter Victoria became her father's companion in Washington before marrying her first cousin, another Lionel Sackville-West, and living at Knole, the beloved family seat in Kent. Victoria found to her surprise and joy that she relished sex with her husband at every opportunity (gardeners would tactfully turn away), but she gave birth to one child in such agony that she vowed to have no more children and no more sex. The marriage disintegrated and the relationship with her one daughter was both passionate and fraught. That one daughter was Vita Sackville-West, the writer and close friend of Virginia Woolf, who herself became both charismatic and selfish and damaging like her mother. On the eve of her marriage to the Conservative Harold Nicolson who adored her throughout his long life, Vita kept to her bed stricken by depression and weeping and shortly after her marriage she fled to Italy with her lover Violet Trefusis. She did return however, had sons with her husband and with him they established the beautiful garden at Sissinghurst. Her son Nigel was Juliet's dearly-loved father. He made a disastrous marriage to Philippa who had money but an impossibly antipathetic culture. Nigel did not love her and found sex shameful, something that had to be done as he wrote, 'like going to the lavatory'. Philippa was deeply unhappy and was a neglectful and deeply damaging mother to Juliet, finally moving permanently to the jet-set at Saint Tropez and a second unhappy marriage.

What runs though these fascinating and beautifully interwoven life-stories are the failings of the mothers seemingly passed down through the generations, made more searingly damaging, despite (or because of) all the blessings that money could provide, by alcoholism and unhappiness. Victoria sank into alcohol-aided dementia; Vita (Juliet's grand-mother) would be wheeled back to the house in a wheelbarrow by loyal gardeners who would find her slumped amongst the roses; Philippa ended up a hopeless and pathetic alcoholic and fatally destroyed her liver - and most shocking of all is Juliet's own candid account of her own slump into alcoholism following the disintegration of her long and initially very happy marriage when she found herself repeating the cruel neglect of her own mother to her towards her own daughters. But she overcame her alcohol demons and righted the wrongs imposed on her daughters, one of whom has given her the gift of an adored grand-daughter.

Fantastic listening and sympathetically read! But I was on enough occasions for it to be annoying surprised by the narrator's mis-pronunciation of words, particularly names - which is why I gave the reading 4 instead of 5. The rest is 5+

Generations of formidable mothers and daughters

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Vita Sackville West was just a name I remember from my childhood. Having heard ti on TV for one reason and another it sounded strange and intriguing but that was all. Having listened to this extremely interesting and superbly written part biography part auto biography I feel that the story behind the name has been clearly and satisfyingly presented. Jolly enjoyable, interesting and revealing with the ability to transport one into the time of Pepita and to inside the authoritatively described Knole House.

Enthralling.

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What a fascinating piece of social history, right down to the current day. Juliet was immensely brave and therefore very interesting about her own life and difficulties. I tend to listen to audio books to lull me off to sleep but I had several sleepless nights (that's a compliment!)

Brave and fascinating

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A wonderfully rich and detailed account which spans generations, tells of lives and loves and explores the personal struggles that the women of this family had to face in order to survive.

Wonderful

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