A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations (2016) By Juliet Nicolson

Clearly when your childhood was lived at Sissinghurst Castle, and your grandmother is Vita Sackville-West, there are interesting tales to be told, yet those tales neither began nor ended with Vita.  In A House Full of Daughters, Juliet Nicolson (generation six) gives readers a genealogy tracing the female side of a very artistic and literary family. The result is fascinating and quite readable.

The story begins in 1830 with Catalina, raising a family in a poor neighborhood of Malaga, Spain.  Her daughter, Pepita will grow up to be an internationally celebrated flamenco dancer billed as the Star of Andalusia. Catalina, as readers will discover, was the ultimate stage Mom.   

While Pepita performs in Paris, she is able to escape her mother’s control, and begins an affair with an aristocrat, Lionel Sackville-West, a member of the British diplomatic corps. Their relationship, never sanctified by marriage, will produce a daughter named Victoria. When Pepita dies, Lionel, who always acknowledged his paternity of Victoria, continued to provide for her; but as a traveling diplomat he was just not equipped to be a single father.  He enrolls her in a convent school in France. 

After Victoria graduated, she re-connected with her father and went with him when he was appointed the British Minster to the United States. Victoria soon assumed the duties that were normally expected of an Ambassador’s spouse.  Victoria thrived in that role, becoming prominent in Washington social circles.  When Lionel’s post ended they returned to England where he had recently inherited the family estate, Knole House, upon the death of his childless older brother.  Victoria immediately falls in love with Knole House, but she knows she will never inherit the estate because of Britain’s primogeniture laws (only male children can inherit titles and property).  The next-in-line to inherit was her cousin, also named Lionel Sackville-West, and Victoria marries him to maintain her station at Knole House.  The marriage produces a daughter who is named after her mother but who will be called Vita.  Importantly however, the marriage did not produce a male heir. Although both Lionel and Victoria had other significant romantic relationships, they tolerated each other’s affairs and never divorced.   

Vita Sackville-West was raised at Knole House. She was what we might call bohemian in-spirit, more accurately she was a privileged young aristocrat with an independent streak. She was also bi-sexual – notoriously having an affair with a friend who would later become her Maid of Honor when she married Harold Nicholson, a British diplomat much like her grandfather. 

From its onset, Vita and Harold’s relationship was intellectual more than physical, though they did have children.  They were loving, close and respectful … but exclusivity was not in their genes. 

Vita’s affairs would include one of the more legendary ones in British literature, that with Virginia Wolfe.  Vita was the inspiration for Wolfe’s classic Orlando.  An author in her own right, Vita penned another classic of British literature, The Edwardians, a social critique of early 20^th century British aristocracy.  Not sitting at home alone, Harold would have his own series of affairs, with men, but was quite closeted, a necessity because of Britain’s sodomy law.

The “loss” of Knole House, because “as a daughter” she could not inherit it, weighed heavily on Vita throughout her life. She made a vow to never be financial dependent on a man.  When she and Harold bought their own estate, Sissinghurst Castle, it was with her money, and in her name.  Ironically, both of their children were sons, Ben and Nigel. The female side of the blood-line would have to skip a generation – though Philippa, the wife of Vita’s son Nigel, would serve as an interesting stand-in.

Philippa’s childhood coincided with World War II. Her lineage was every bit as aristocratic as the Sackville name, though of the prim and proper kind, not the literary bohemian type.  She was raised to be the mistress of the house, not a socialite.  In many ways that could have been the formula for a satisfying marriage with Nigel, a Conservative Party Member of Parliament, and for a while it was.  They would have two children, Adam and Juliette (this book’s author).  But the constant comparisons to both Vita and Victoria -- a measurement she could not win -- took its toll, her marriage fell apart.  Eventually she would rebel becoming her own woman, abandoning prim and proper, and flee to St. Tropaz, the epicenter of the “jet set” scene where appearance scored higher than intellect. The children were largely raised by their father, and a series of nannies.

Juliette’s autobiographical chapters have many 60s and 70s cultural references from her adolescent years.  She recaps the challenges, some painful, of growing up in a split household bouncing between the polar-opposite home environments.  She will eventually marry and have two daughters, Clemmie and Flora, generation seven. They will relocate to New York where the demands of careers, child-care & guilt, and the everyday stress of living in 1980s Manhattan will help drive Juliette to the family curse of alcohol, and eventually the demise of the marriage.  As divorces go however, it wasn’t contentious.  Her husband did not stand in the way of Juliette and the girls returning to England to live at Sissinghurst with Nigel.  There they would bring a needed calmness to their lives.  

As the book ends, Imogene who is generation eight, is born.  This book is for her to know, and to write the next chapters.

A House Full of Daughters is an unusual book to read.  It is a genealogy written following the female line, unusual for most western societies, (and more difficult to trace because of the changing surnames) and also written in a female perspective – think Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (though I’m not equating the two books). 

Recommendation:  If you are a daughter or a fan of Bloomsbury-like literary histories, you’ll identify with and enjoy the book.  If you are not, then perhaps you need to read the book.