Fox - Five sisters : the langhornes of virginia
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- Book:Five sisters : the langhornes of virginia
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- Year:2014
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Abstract: The author of the bestseller White Mischief tells the story of the beautiful Langhorne sisters, who lived at the Pinnacle of high and powerful society from the end of the Civil War through the Second World War. Making their way across two continents, they left in their wakes rich husbands, fame, adoration, and scandal. Lizzie, Irene, Nancy, Phyllis, and Nora were born in Virginia to a family impoverished by the Civil War. Their father remade his fortune by collaborating with the Yankees and building rail-roads; the sisters became southern belles and northern debutantes. James Fox draws on unpublished correspondence between the sisters and their husbands, lovers, children, and the powerful and glamorous of their day to construct a plural topography with the scope of a grand novel and the pace of a historical thriller. At its center is the most famous sister, Nancy, who married Waldorf Astor, one of the richest men in the world. Heroic, hilarious, magnetically charming, and a bully, Lady Astor became Britains first female MP, championing womens rights and the poor. The beautiful Irene married Charles Dana Gibson and was the model for the Gibson Girl. The authors grandmother, Phyllis, married a famous economist, one of the architects of modern Europe. Fox has written an absorbing and spirited, intimate and sweeping account of extraordinary women at the highest reaches of society, their adventures set against the background of a tumultuous century
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SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
Copyright 2000 by James Fox
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Kyoko Watanabe
ISBN 0-7432-1700-4
The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following:
Extracts from unpublished letter by Joyce Grenfell. Copyright Joyce Grenfell.
Extracts from Darling MaLetters to Her Mother 1932-1944, edited and introduced by James Roose Evans. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988. Copyright 1988 by Reginald Grenfell and James Roose Evans.
Extract from Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure. London: Macmillan, 1976. Copyright Joyce Grenfell 1976.
Verse from The D-Day Dodgers by permission of Hamish Henderson.
For Francis Wyndham
and
in loving memory of my mother,
Dinah Bridge, 1920-1998
CHISWELL DABNEY LANGHORNE (1843-1919), known as Chillie, pronounced Shilly; patriarch of the Langhorne family; railroad entrepreneur, sometime tobacco auctioneer. Husband of Nanaire.
NANCY WITCHER KEENE LANGHORNE, Nanaire (1848-1903), wife of Chillie Langhorne, whom she married in 1864.
Their children in order of age:
LIZZIE (1867-1914) married Moncure Perkins in 1885; three children: Chiswell (Chillie), Nancy, Alice.
KEENE (1869-1916), married Sadie Reynolds.
IRENE (1873-1956) married the artist Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944), creator of the Gibson Girl; two children: Irene (Babs) and Langhorne.
HARRY (1874-1907) married Genevieve Peyton.
NANCY (1879-1964) married Robert Gould Shaw II of Boston (1871-1930), divorced 1903; one child: Bobbie Shaw. Married Waldorf Astor, later 2nd Viscount Astor (1879-1952); five children: Bill, Phyllis (Wissie), David, Michael, John Jacob (Jakie).
PHYLLIS (1880-1937) married Reginald (Reggie) Brooks November 1901; two children: Peter and David (Winkie); separated in 1912, divorced 1915. Married Robert Henry Brand (Bob) in 1917; three children: Virginia, Dinah, Jim.
WILLIAM (Buck) (1886-1938) married Edith Forsyth; five children: Dabney, Phyllis, Harry, Keene, Douglas.
NORA (1889-1955) married Paul Phipps in 1909; two children: Joyce (later Grenfell) and Tommy; divorced 1931. Married Maurice Bennet Flynn (Lefty) in 1932.
Other main characters, in the order that their names first appear in the book:
ALICE WINN (b. 1902), younger daughter of Lizzie.
BOB BRAND (Robert Henry Brand) (1878-1963), later 1st Lord Brand of Eydon. Member of Milners Kindergarten and the Round Table, economist and banker, married Phyllis in 1917. Grandfather of the author.
BOBBIE SHAW (Robert Gould Shaw) (1898-1970), only son of Nancy and Robert (Bob) Shaw of Boston.
CHARLES DANA GIBSON (1867-1944), artist and illustrator, creator of the Gibson Girl, married Irene in 1895.
DAVID ASTOR (b. 1912), Nancy and Waldorfs second son, later editor of the Observer.
DINAH BRIDGE (1920-1998), younger daughter of Phyllis; mother of the author.
HENRY DOUGLAS PENNANT (1876-1915), the Captain. Soldier and trophy shooter, younger son of Baron Penrhyn.
JIM BRAND (1924-1945), only son of Phyllis and Bob Brand.
LEFTY FLYNN (1880-1950), former Yale football star, silent screen actor, and Noras second husband.
MICHAEL ASTOR (1916-1980), Nancy and Waldorfs third son, author of Tribal Feeling.
MONCURE PERKINS (1861-1914), Lizzies husband, father of Nancy Lancaster and Alice Winn.
NANCY LANCASTER (1897-1994), Lizzies eldest daughter, gardener and decorator, who married (1) Henry Field, (2) Ronnie Tree, and (3) Juby Lancaster.
PAUL PHIPPS (1880-1953), Noras first husband, father of Joyce Grenfell and Tommy Phipps.
PETER BROOKS (1902-1944), eldest son of Phyllis and her first husband, Reggie Brooks.
PHILIP KERR (1882-1940), later 11th Marquis of Lothian. Member of Milners Kindergarten and the Round Table; British Ambassador to the United States, 1939-1940.
REGGIE BROOKS (1876-1945), Phylliss first husband; father of Peter and Winkie Brooks.
WINKIE BROOKS (1910-1936), Phylliss second son with Reggie Brooks.
WISSIE (PHYLLIS) ASTOR, later Countess of Ancaster (1909-1975), only daughter of Nancy and Waldorf.
Five Sisters
T HE LANGHORNE SISTERS of Virginia were a phenomenon in America, in the South and then in the North, long before the third of Chillie Langhornes five daughters crossed the Atlantic and became, as Nancy Astor, in 1919, the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament. For a decade or two after that, she was probably the most famous woman in the world. Nancy, in turn, had grown up in the shadow of her elder sister Irene. It was Irene who had first projected the sisterhood into the public imagination when she emerged in 1890 in Virginia, aged seventeen, as the last great Southern Belle; two years later, she was the first to go north since the Civil War, to lead the debutante balls. She married, in 1895, the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, into whose image Irene merged, thus achieving celebrity comparable now only in movie star or supermodel terms. Irenes rise to fame coincided with the moment that Chillie Langhorne, the patriarch of this family, who was born into the old Virginian squirearchy, a class ruinedlike every other in Virginiaby the war, made a sudden fortune on the railroads and rescued his family from twenty-five years of poverty and hardship in the years of Reconstruction.
Langhorne installed his family at Mirador, a colonnaded house at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the younger children, Nancy and her closest sister, Phyllis, Nora, and Buck, grew up. For the northern admirers who came down on the train to propose to Irene and to inspect this glamorous family, the setting was important in the Langhorne sisters myth. It was a long way from the overcrowded four-room bungalow in Danville, where most of them were born and spent their early childhood; or the dusty streets of funereal Richmond, where they had moved from one rented house to another. It was a sudden transformationand a rare one for Virginians at the time.
Nancy and, soon afterward, Phyllis, barely out of their teens, and both beauties to rival Irene, followed their elder sister north, encouraged by their father and their mother, Nanaire, to escape the poverty trap in Richmond. Both made disastrous first marriages to idle, hard-drinking northern millionaires, and both made their retreat from this further humiliation by the Yankees, across the Atlantic to Englanda place of homecoming, as they saw itwhere Irene and Dana, on their grand tours, had already become assimilated into Edwardian royal circles. Nancy and Phyllis, both brilliant and fearless riders, shipped their horses from Virginia and first made their mark on English society on the hunting fields of Leicestershire. Within two years, having turned down many titled suitors, Nancy in 1906 married Waldorf Astor, whose father, William Waldorf Astor, had settled in England and who was considered then the richest man in the world. Later, Phyllis, who had taken longer to extract herself from her own first husband, married Bob Brand, Oxford scholar, economic expert, and intellectual, known since he was a young imperial civil servant as The Wisest Man in the Empire.
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