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Judith Flanders
A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: ALICE KIPLING, GEORGIANA BURNE-JONES, AGNES POYNTER AND LOUISA BALDWIN Paperback: 432 pages Penguin Books (2001, 2002) ISBN: 9780140284898 Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 06/14/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * * review: Different people will read for different reasons this uniquely conceived and structured, continuously narrated collection of biographies of several generations of the Macdonald family. I, for instance, read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS by Judith Flanders primarily for insights into Alice Kipling, nee Macdonald, mother of the Nobel Prize winning writer Rudyard Kipling. I also knew that young Rudyard and his even younger sister Trix loved and were greatly influenced and promoted socially by their Macdonald aunts, by the increasingly successful men whom four of them married (three were important artists) and by the cousins they begot -- including Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. I had not realized going into A CIRCLE OF SISTERS how very original would be author Flander's structuring of her interlocking tale of several generations of a very creative family. Individuals, argues Judith Flanders, do not pop up out of nowhere. They are produced by families and live in houses. As fascinating as are the writers, painters, politicians (including one Prime Minister), equally so are the sketches of changes in household management, dining and in new clothing styles, modes of transportation, inventions and sanitary improvements that were incorporated into the daily lives of the rising middle classes of Ireland and England. Here are some examples bearing on technological change: -- (1) In the 1840s a London inspector found homes with cellars three feet deep in human waste that had overflowed from cesspools. In 20 years cholera killed more than 30,000 people; a third cholera epidemic in 1854 killed 10,738 Londoners. -- (2) Most characters limned by Judith Flanders faced serious illness more than once. Thus Macdonald sister Louisa came down with smallpox; in 1864 her sister Georgiana took scarlet fever. -- (3) By 1878 there were electric lights (briefly) in London. But many still preferred candles or "unwholesome" gas light, with its smoke and "nauseous" smells. -- (4) The five sisters' mother Hannah Macdonald was a frugal Methodist minister's wife who had to move every few years with her growing brood. "Housekeeping
took up and enormous amount of time. Even with the help of two
servants, it was a heroic undertaking simple to keep a house clean. An
average household burned a ton of coal every six weeks. ... the dirt
thrown out by the fires was immense. Until the 1890s, coal rather than
gas ranges were used in the kitchen for cooking, and heating water. ..."
(There follows a long description of household chores involving cisterns and even pre-chemically cleaned laundry -- which "took three or four days out of every fortnight" and other examples of domestic labor.) (Ch 2). There may be as many as twenty such detailed non-biographical passages in A CIRCLE OF SISTERS giving the ever evolving practices of private and public health, transportation by water and road, clothes making, fashion, mixing paints, and the like. I personally found this background material of enormous value.The Macdonald sisters lived in a harsher, cruder physical environment than we. A CIRCLE OF SISTERS also abounds with scores of sketches of painters, artists' models, poets, politicians and men and women about town who provided backdrop for the Kiplings and their more affluent in-laws. All in all A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is a very valuable book for its biographies and its vividly depicted milieux. I would not call it an easy read (the cast of characters is at times overwhelming to keep straight). But informative it unquestionably is, and very well written. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/205664632.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 06/15/2011 name of review: Four Macdonald sisters: intended by paradoxical Victorian mores to be "fragile pillars of strength." rating: * * * * review: Biographer Judith Flanders, born 1959 in England, raised from age two and educated in Canada, now lives in England. She demonstrated how to grab readers' attention in her very first book, A CIRCLE OF SISTERS. Here is how Chapter One begins: "Four women connect four men by a slender but steely thread. One man is an earl, and three times prime minister; the second a Nobel prizewinner who turned down a knighthod, the Poet Laureateship and the Order of Merit; the third is a baronet and leading Pre-Raphaelite painter; and the fourth is also a baronet, who has been both director of the National Gallery and president of the Royal Academy. The thread is the Macdonald sisters -- four women who were the mothers of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling and the wives of Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter." Like author Judith Flanders, I first became aware of the four famous married Macdonald women and their unfamous (because unmarried, infertile?) sister Caroline, while reading into the history of Rudyard Kipling. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, had courted and won the much engaged Alice Macdonald and then sailed off with her to a job teaching art in Bombay, where Rudyard was born in 1865. The witty, acerbic, literary, flirtatious Alice Macdonald Kipling soon fascinated more than one British Viceroy. And husband John Lockwood won the respect of a princely son of Queen Victoria and through that connection a commission to decorate in an Indian style a stately room of one of Her Majesty's residences. As Flanders says in her Introduction, there had been two previous biographies of the Macdonald sisters. Both biographers had noted the four sisters' marriages and the economic, artistic and social rise of their initially obscure husbands and the fame of at least two of their sons. But earlier biographers simply noted that fact but failed to make sense of the interconnections. Desiring to fill in the blanks and explain what was special about the Macdonald sisters, Judith Flanders conceived a new form of biography: in which individuals like Nobelist Rudyard Kipling and his first cousin Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin are seen as products of larger family groupings, households and the rapidly evolving technologies of their age -- rather than as stand-alone super achievers. In her next book, THE VICTORIAN HOME, Flanders looks at middle-class Victorian households and living conditions from marriage, childbirth, child rearing, entertaining, doing laundry (plunging bare hands into boiling water), being ill and dying. There are twenty or thirty detailed examples of evolving technologies, including rail transport, flush toilets, gas lights and much more in the earlier A CIRCLE OF SISTERS and they provide nuggets worth reading for their own sakes. In the Victorian Age, authors asked the impossible of stereotypical British women. For their parents while they lived at home and later for their husbands, middle-class women were to be "fragile pillars of strength." Intelligent men looked for women of genius to become their mates. But if wives were conceded to have genius, it was to be a notably passive genius: genius for quietly intuiting and supporting the positive, forceful talents and superior points of their mates and of their husbands' circle of male friends. Two of the Macdonald sisters, Agnes Poynter and Georgiana Burne-Jones, proved unnecessary to their husbands' success and fame as painters. In consequence, speculates biographer Judith Flanders, Louisa and Agnes retreated to their sickbeds for decades. "No one could fail to be aware of them, but it was awareness of an absence, not a presence." By contrast both Alice Kipling and Louisa Baldwin perceived themselves as (and were for a fact) essential to their husbands' careers. These two women, being so "present" in their times, also, therefore, tend to dominate the text of A CIRCLE OF SISTERS. Read this fascinating book for any number of reasons: because of your interest in one or more of the sisters's husbands, sons, daughters or circle of friends. Or read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS for insights into competing trends in Victorian literature and art -- especially the Pre-Raphaelites. The Kipling siblings, Rudyard and younger sister Trix, were fascinated by their more affluent aunts, uncles and cousins and those families contributed much to what the siblings became (later in Lahore, India, Rudyard, Trix, John Lockwood and Alice McDonald Kipling formed a "family square" of four creative writers.) But before the small "family square" there had been the much larger "circle of sisters." Or delve into the many passages describing Victorian households, with their staggering number of deaths from cholera, with the ton of coal they burned every six weeks, with their transition to travel by train and their movement from lighting by candles or whale oil through gas to electricity. In my opinion, author Judith Flanders largely pulls off her new way of conceiving writing biographies. The obvious weakness of her "fours sisters" narrative framework is that it involves five or six generations, especially of Kiplings, and sketches another few score relatives, in-laws, friends and fellow travelers. In short, unity of narrative is a bit on the weak side because of the sheer number of persons written about over so many decades. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/book/UserReview-A_Circle_of_Sisters_ Alice_Kipling_Georgiana_Burne_Jones_Agnes_Poynter_and_Louisa_Baldwin- 74-1372675-208827-Four_Macdonald_sisters_intended_by_paradoxical.html (3) bn.com 06/16/2011 title of review: Rudyard Kipling's mother Alice Macdonald and her one unmarried and three married sisters rating: * * * * review: Who can read with profit Judith Flanders's 2001 (and later) A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: ALICE KIPLING, GEORGIANA BURNE-JONES, AGNES POYNTER AND LOUISA BALDWIN? If these four "Macdonald" sisters's names mean nothing to you, know that Alice's son Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. Louisa birthed Stanley Baldwin, who became Prime Minister and an Earl. Georgiana and Agnes married men who made themselves leading painters and artistic bonzes of the Victorian Age. Is that still not enough to tempt you to read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS? Well, here are some more points of entry. - (1) Judith Flanders attempts what she says is an entirely new kind of BIOGRAPHY. Focus is on entire families rather than supposedly stand-alone geniuses or achievers. And of nearly equal importance are the households, houses, kitchens, bathrooms, approaches to healing, modes of transport and such like which supported or sapped the energies of the families being described. - (2) If you have a particular interest in one or more members of the extended, interlocking Macdonald family -- as I do for Rudyard Kipling -- you may be surprised to find explanations here that have eluded other biographers. Why, for instance, did the parents of very
young Rudyard and Trix Kipling send them back from India to live for
years in a hell of an English boarding house instead of lodging them
with their already affluent inlaws or parents?
Note also the parents' decision to send Rudyard, after his nerve-shattering ordeal in the boarding house, to the United Services School, a new prep school at Westward Ho! run by Cormell Price. From biographies of Rudyard Kipling, I knew vaguely that Price was an old "friend of the Macdonald family." But Judith Flanders takes us back to the school days of Alice Macdonald Kipling's brother Henry when Henry brought home to his family's home in Birmingham school chums such as Cormell Price. Price was to play a seminal role in turning Kipling into a professional writer and landing his first job with a newspaper in Lahore, India. This biography links together a lot of scattered biographical data picked up elsewhere. - (3) Alice Macdonald Kipling's great grandfather left Skye, Scotland after the 1745 rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie, for Ireland. The author gives a feeling for the personal impact of Methodism's founder John Wesley on the Macdonalds of Ireland and later England. The sisters were products of strong Methodist households. So read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS both for the Clan Macdonald and for evangelical Methodism. My first reading of this complex narrative left me a bit confused: too many generations of too many interlocking families for anything like tight narrative unity. But I liked the book enough to know that I had to read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS a second time. I was then struck by the author's asserted importance of families in forming individuals. Also sticking in my memory are the forty or fifty passages about life in Victorian England, e.g., the scourge of constipation based on too much use of opiates as medicine combined with too much meat eating; the thousands dying every year in London of tuberculosis or cholera; the drudgery of cooking over an open fire and under a soot-choked chimney; the ton of coal a middle-class family burnt every six weeks and the resultant dirt all over the house. All in all, A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is a worthy, ambitious work, nearly carried off. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Josephine Koeppel - EDITH STEIN: PHILOSOPHER AND MYSTIC -- Edith Stein - SELF PORTRAIT IN LETTERS -- Frank M. Turner - JOHN HENRY NEWMAN http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review. aspx?reviewid=1701561 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 06/16/2011 title of review: One Generation of Macdonalds seen through Childhood, Marriage and Children, Empty Nests and Old Age and Death rating: * * * * review: "Once is not enough," when it comes to how many readings it takes to do justice to Judith Flanders biography of 2001, A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: ALICE KIPLING, GEORGIANA BURNE-JONES, AGNES POYNTER AND LOUISA BALDWIN. I got quite a lot from my first reading into the doings of a half dozen generations of the Macdonald family resident first in Skye, Scotland till 1746, then in Northern Ireland, then England, then in New York (in the case of Rudyard Kipling's ill-starred uncle Harry Macdonald). I read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS primarily for fresh insights into the upbringing of Rudyard Kipling and his younger sister Trix. I knew them and their father John Lockhart Kipling and mother Alice Macdonald Kipling from other biographies. But I remained at sea on two points: (1) why had father and mother Kipling not
"boarded" their two very young offspring with their reasonably well-off
parents or siblings when they dropped them off in England and returned
to India where Lockhart was teaching art? and
(2) Why precisely had they sent Rudyard, after his miserable years in a boarding house (not school) to the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon? Biographer Flanders gives the best explanations I have seen so far. And some sort of explanation -- even speculative -- is surely needed to keep the senior Kiplings from appearing monsters for keeping their children a decade away from their homes and parents in India. Nonetheless, I felt the unity of narration weaker than desirable at the end of reading one. Far too many people to keep straight! On a second reading I paid more attention to the Chapter Groupings and gave them more credit as a unifying force: I. Childhood
(beginning back on the Isle of Skye in +/- 1746)
II. Marriage and Children (1859 - 1882) III. Empty Nests (1882 - 1898) IV. Old Age and Death (1898 - 1906). I also studied in more detail the 50 or 60 excursuses by Judith Flanders into disease, illness and health care (constipation as Victorian curse!), heating and lighting houses, transportation by foot, coach and train and changes in women's fashions. These passages are worth reading on their own merit. Finally, the author has a quirky but defensible, ostensibly original, slant on biographing. Let others focus on stand-alone geniuses or super achievers as if they pulled out everything valuable from their innards by personal prowess and true grit! Judith Flanders will show how genes, personal acquaintances, household amenities and challenges make the man -- or the woman. How else explain that four sisters, born barely middle class, would end up as mothers of a Nobel Prize winner for literature, a Prime Minister who died an Earl, and as wives of two leading British painters and art critics of the Victorian Age. This book is not for skimming. But its author is on to something and nearly realizes her ambitious vision. -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Circle-Sisters-Judith-Flanders/product-reviews/0140284893/ ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_4?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addFourStar =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 10/16/2011 Review Title: "my outside is not my strong side" Product Rating: * * * * PROS: Lovingly detailed lives of four 19th Century Macdonald sisters known for husbands, sons and milieux. CONS: Weak on narrative "CUE": Coherence, Unity, Emphasis. Resists summing up. Too many characters described. BOTTOM LINE: Care for any of the important men whom the four Macdonald sisters either married or birthed? A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is for you. Ditto the gritty ambience of Victoran England. aohcapablanca's Full Review: Once upon a time in Queen Victoria's England there were four sisters named Macdonald. Their other names were Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa. Later they would add through marriage, respectively, Kipling, Burne-Jones, Poynter and Baldwin. A fifth sister Caroline had died young and unwed at age 14 in 1854. In 1937 sister number six died, spinster Edith, "the most overlooked, undervalued member of the family," "exactly 100 years after her sister Alice had been born. All this and mountains more we learn in lavish detail from Judith Flanders' 2001 multi-person biography, A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: ALICE KIPLING, GEORGIANA BURNE-JONES, AGNES POYNTER AND LOUISA BALDWIN. Earlier biographers had noted in passing that the four married Macdonald sisters had wed or given birth to (or both) some pretty remarkable Victorian men. The two outstanding sons were 1907 Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling and three times Prime Minister (and later Earl) Stanley Baldwin. The husbands included Rudyard's father John Lockhart Kipling who did pioneering work as an educator in Anglo-India, as an ethnographer and as illustrator of some of Rudyard's works; Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, both famous painters of their day. But Judith Flanders thought the marriages and genetic downlines of four of the six Macdonald sisters to be social phenomena worth more than a cursory glance. Flanders therefore embedded the four sisters in an original framework for biography which assumes that super achievers like Kipling and Baldwin do not create themselves in isolation. Rather they are products of multi-generational families, of the mores and values of their age and even of the houses in which they live, not to mention their schools, the challenges to their health and the rapidly changing technology of the mid- and later 19th Century United Kingdom. I personally ordered and read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS for more insight into Rudyard Kipling's mother Alice Macdonald Kipling. And indeed I found a few new nuggets about her. For example, biographers and today's readers tend to throw up their hands in horror at the memory of five year old "Ruddy" and three-year old Trix Kipling being dumped without explanation in a boarding house in the south of England for several miserable years while their parents sailed back to Bombay. -- Why had the children not been placed in
England or Scotland with the parents or siblings of John Lockhart or
Alice? Judith Flanders presents plausible explanations.
-- She also makes quite clear how very far back Cormell Price, Ruddy's seminal headmaster at his follow-on United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, had been a young intimate of the Macdonalds in Birmingham as a school chum of the sisters' disappointing elder brother Henry. Another nugget for Kipling watchers. I have to confess, however, that even after two readings of A CIRCLE OF SISTERS I do not have any great three-dimensional sense of the other major characters of the biography except, perhaps, for the two contrasting Macdonald sons, Harry and Fred: the former the pampered eldest boy, intended in vain for great things, the latter stinted by a struggling Methodist minister father in monetary support but who turned out well. In a sense, Flanders' biography is a biography of everybody the sisters came in contact with. Not only is that too many people to keep straight, but every passing character (especially if he or she can be tagged with a contemporary bon mot or quotation) is accorded equal weight. In my high school's old trinity of elements of good writing -- "CUE," coherence, unity, emphasis --. A CIRCLE OF SISTERS stumbles because of lack of all three. An example of what I mean: Eldest sister Alice Macdonald (later Kipling) is described as being a flirt down the decades. When warned against this at a young age by her Methodist minister father, Alice, smartly and typically, "with an air of innocent suprise ... said, 'Ph-l-u-r-t, phlurt, what is that?'" At some imprecise time "in her career as a serial fiancee," Alice was engaged to a quiet Irish poet named William Allingham. Allingham had friends in highest society. He was quiet and unassuming, everything Alice was not. "He admitted that 'my outside was not my strong side.'" Later in India's summer capital of mountain high Simla, Alice Macdonald Kipling's charms captivated at least one Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, and prevented daughter Trix from attracting all the handsomest young beaux. Rudyard, in a contemporary poem "My Rival," has Trix lamenting: "... I wish I had her constant cheek:
I wish that I could sing All sorts of funny little songs. Not quite the proper thing. I'm very gauche and very shy, Her jokes aren't in my line; And worst of all, I'm seventeen While she is forty-nine." Fiance William Allingham's claim to space in A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is little more than his rank as a fourth rate man of letters and his self-deprecating bon mot: 'my outside was not my strong side.' A charming interlude, but not much more. The biography is also vastly and charmingly didactic. It abounds in descriptions of Victorian ways of being ill, including constipation rooted in too much use of opium-based medicines and over consumption of beef, of lugging a thousand tons of coal every six weeks from fire to fire around a house with subsequent dust everywhere, of horrible sanitation, thousands of cases of cholera and tuberculosis and the evolution of women's fashions. There must be a hundred such backgrounders and they are fun to read. Two sisters (Alice Kipling and Louisa Baldwin) were vital to their husbands' careers and knew it. Two other sisters (Georgiana Burne-Jones and Agnes Poynter) were not essential to their husbands' success as painters and knew it. Georgiana and Agnes, therefore, according to biographer Flanders, took to their beds for decades and are sensed more as absences than as presences. Who will read this book? Perhaps ardent members of the clan of Donald (Macdonald). Or students of one or more of the husbands or sons of the four married sisters. Or readers eager to test Judith Flanders' new theory of how to write family-based, house-based biographies. Or history buffs keen to grasp a 19th Century England where young men began unafraid to walk 20 miles per day en route from college to home holidays, then moved up to carriages and finally to trains -- interacting with new technologies in transportation, lighting, heating, plumbing and new policies in public health. A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is a bold, creative experiment in biography writing. In its aim it is weak, let me repeat, in narrative coherence, unity and emphasis. But a good read for all that. -OOO- Recommended: Yes. P.S. Thank you, Pestyside Patsy, for serving up A CIRCLE OF SISTERS to reviewersf http://www.epinions.com/review/Judith_Flanders_A_Circle_of_Sisters _epi/content_554332098180 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/flanders_sisters.html |