Aristocrats

The Lennox Sisters--great-granddaughters of a king, daughters of a cabinet minister, and wives of politicians and peers--lived lives of real public significance, but the private texture of their family-centered world mattered to them and they shared their experiences with each other in countless letters. From this hitherto unknown archive, Stella Tillyard has constructed a group biography of privileged eighteenth-century women who, she shows, have much to tell us about our own time.

"Aristocrats is my favourite kind of history: on the one hand it's lucid and scholarly, on the other hand it reads like a novel. I hated to finish it." - Antonia Fraser