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A Circle Of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa BaldwinEditions
Review
The complexity of Flanders’ subject could have resulted in a mess, but she has presented her material in wonderfully readable form, making sense of the people, their connections to one another and their significance to us. Her narrative is not vitiated by anachronistic, superior judgements: she allows her characters to speak for themselves. And speak – and write – they assuredly could. They are all so articulate about their active emotional lives that it is we, in this age of so-called openness, who are put to shame. They remain dignified when expressing themselves, although demanding and often intolerant. Like all the best biographies, this book is fascinating both for its historical insights and also for the reflections it casts on our own times. - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
It was taken as received opinion when I was at school that the Victorians were boring hypocrites. The silliness of this view – still held by some – is exposed yet again in this magnificent book, which follows the lives of the Macdonald sisters. They were born into a middle class family (their father was a respected Methodist preacher) without great expectations. Such as there were rested on the oldest boy, Harry, who emigrated to America as soon as he could and scarcely troubled his family again. The younger boy, Fred, also became a distinguished Methodist preacher. It is for his four older sisters that his family is remembered. (The youngest, Edie, did not marry.) Georgie married “a poor artist of no family” called Jones, who added Burne- to his name and became famous. Agnes married “a poor artist of moderate family” called Poynter, who later acquired a baronetcy as head of the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the pillar at the centre of the Victorian art establishment (poo-poohing the Impressionists). Alice married “an art teacher” called John Lockwood Kipling; their son was Rudyard. Only Louisa married someone already prosperous, an ironmaster named Baldwin, at whose funeral the churchyard was filled by 2000 people who could not fit into the crammed church; their son was the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
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