This stunning book is a wonderful gift or addition to a library or coffee table (as it is in our house). This gorgeous Folio Society edition follows the text of that first edition with minor emendations and has an updated 2007 Preface by the author. Here we have both, brilliantly conceived and executed an irresistible tour de force.Īristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740-1832 by Stella Tillyard, was first published in 1994. As Stella Tillyard observes, biography too often gives intimacy without context, while history gives context without human warmth. In consequence, we learn not just about family life and the sisters’ opinions, but also about the wider world from the failure of the pyrotechnic display at the first performance of Handel’s ‘Fireworks Music’ to contemporary reaction to the madness of King George III. Through all such tribulations the sisters were kept going by letters and by each other. Scandal and tragedy were never far away: Sarah, whose Napier sons distinguished themselves in the Peninsular War, left her husband for another man one of Emily’s sons joined the Irish rebellion and died of septicaemia in Dublin Castle jail.

Louisa and Emily married into grand Irish families and became caught up in the deepening political and economic crisis. Caroline Lennox’s son Charles James Fox became the most celebrated and dangerous politician of his day. They were powerful, wealthy, privileged and radical, lived close to the seat of government, and left behind them a thrilling legacy of letters, diaries, pictures and even autopsy reports, which in the hands of Stella Tillyard has produced a history of the Georgian period as exciting as any novel.Īristocrats is a thorough and engrossing exploration of 18th-century Britain. Four great-grand-daughters of Charles II, Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox flourished in an era that encompassed the French Revolution, rebellion in Ireland and the American War of Independence.

Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard