Volume 47, Number 9 · May 25, 2000
All in the Family
By Robert Skidelsky
Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia
by James Fox
Simon and Schuster, 496 pp., $30.00
In the early 1980s, the English writer James Fox was shown a large trunk at his grandfather's house in Northamptonshire covered in Cunard and White Star steamship stickers. On inspection it turned out to contain thousands of letters between the Langhorne sisters, as well as other correspondence, carefully collected and preserved by his grandfather, Robert Brand, who had married one of them. It was a collection, Fox writes, made possible by two or three posts a day and the convention of returning letters to their senders 'in time of grief.' That first encounter with the trunk has led to his absorbing chronicle of a Virginian family which sprang to prominence on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the last century, but paid a heavy price for fame and fortune in the wrecked lives of their children.
Review, 4501 words
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