Volume 42, Number 5 · March 23, 1995
Little Women
By P.N. Furbank
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832
by Stella Tillyard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 406 pp., $30.00
The subject of Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats is the four daughters of Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond, Lord of the Bedchamber to George II, and owner of Goodwood House in Sussex (famous for its Canaletto paintings and its menagerie). There have been separate biographies of Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox,[1] but none, I think, of Caroline; and the promising idea of a composite biography is entirely Tillyard's own. The work is plainly the fruit of very thorough and painstaking research, in a quite enormous archive (the voluminous Holland House papers, the Leinster papers, the Napier papers, the Bunbury papers, and a whole string of lesser collections). Also, whatever reservations one may have about it—and I have rather a lot—it is certainly an intensely readable book.
Review, 3561 words
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