Circle of Sisters Reviews

'A Circle of Sisters': Eminent Victorians by Amanda Foreman New York Times May 8, 2005

'Models of Womanhood' by Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph 2001

'Reader, they married them' by Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph 2001

'A Circle of Sisters': Eminent Victorians

The Sisters
Photos courtesy Helen Macdonald/National Portrait Gallery/From "Circle of Sisters"

From left: Alice Macdonald Kipling (mother of Rudyard) at 53, 1890; Georgiana Macdonald Burne-Jones, wife of the artist, in 1900 at the age of 60; Louisa Macdonald Baldwin, several years before her death in 1925 at 79 (she was Stanley Baldwin's mother); Agnes Macdonald Poynter in her 50's, sometime in the 1890's (her husband was director of the National Gallery).

By Amanda Foreman
May 8, 2005
New York Times

GEORGIANA, Agnes, Alice and Louisa Macdonald were four Victorian sisters from the wrong side of the class divide. Their father was a Methodist minister, their mother the daughter of a wholesale grocer. Primarily home-educated like most girls of their station, they were bright rather than intellectual, pretty rather than beautiful, domestic rather than ambitious. Nothing in their early lives suggested that they would become the 19th-century equivalent of the Langhorne sisters.
Georgiana married the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and Agnes the arts administrator Sir Edward Poynter. Alice gave birth to Rudyard Kipling and Louisa to the future prime minister Stanley Baldwin. And yet, as Judith Flanders reveals in her engaging family history, ''A Circle of Sisters,'' proximity to greatness ensured them neither happiness nor fulfillment.

Unsurprisingly, the designated star of the Macdonald family was the eldest son, Harry, whose parents scrimped and sacrificed in order to send him to the best private school in Birmingham. He was the acknowledged genius, the receptacle of all their pride and hope. Even his younger brother, Fred, received a third-tier education so Harry might have new books and clothes. However, all this pressure and worship did more harm than good, leaving Harry with a crippling sense of entitlement and a shirker's attitude to work. After failing to take his degree at Oxford, he sailed to New York in 1858, penniless and prospectless, and disappeared from the family annals as if his existence had been a bad dream.

But Harry did leave one important legacy to his sisters. Among his school friends was Ned Jones, a poor boy with outsize artistic ambitions. Even after Ned went to Oxford and dropped Harry in preference for the more cultured William Morris, he still regularly visited the Macdonalds for tea. Harry's sister Georgiana was not yet 16 when Ned proposed. They were married four years later, in 1860.

Ned changed his last name to the grander-sounding Burne-Jones, but he and his wife were desperately poor for the first few years. Flanders is particularly adept at describing the back-breaking work Georgiana undertook as she tackled what the Victorians euphemistically described as domestic chores. Sheets had to be washed, clothes cleaned, fire grates emptied, vermin eradicated, everyday soot and dust removed. The family's lodgings had only a limited supply of cold water and no kitchen. Somehow, though, Georgiana managed to create an inviting home where Ruskin, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne were regular visitors.What crushed her was not the thanklessness of domestic life -- or Burne-Jones's cheerful dismissal of her own artistic talents -- but her exclusion from company once her first child was born. ''I remember the feeling of exile with which I now heard through its closed doors the well-known voices of friends together with Edward's familiar laugh,'' Georgiana wrote, ''while I sat with my little son on my knee and dropped selfish tears upon him as the 'separator of companions and the terminator of delights.' ''Although the sale of Burne-Jones's paintings and his partnership with William Morris improved Georgiana's standard of living, her marital happiness seems to have been brief. After her husband's death, she claimed that the three best years of her life were 1856 to 59, during their engagement. For Burne-Jones, the golden years were those of his affair with the Greek sculptor Mary Zambaco, which nearly ended in a suicide pact. He later compounded the betrayal by exhibiting a painting entitled ''Phyllis and Demophoon,'' which depicted Mary as the nymph Phyllis.

Georgiana consoled herself with her children and her friends (among whom were George Eliot and Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle). William Morris loved her to his dying breath, although there is no evidence that their deep relationship was anything more than platonic. Certainly they were a great deal better suited to each other than to their spouses. Like Morris, Georgiana remained a life-long socialist. Though Burne-Jones slowly fossilized into the bedrock of the establishment, accepting a baronetcy for the sake of his son (or so he claimed), his wife continued to be true to her radical ideals. Even in old age, she defied convention by supporting the Boers against the British, and later rejoiced at the Russian Revolution.

Georgiana's older sister, Alice, the mother of Rudyard Kipling, was a much more steely character. She had also married an artist, but, unlike Ned Burne-Jones, John Lockwood Kipling was a quiet, earnest man whose passion lay in teaching and art history. When he accepted a schoolmaster's post in Bombay, Alice was forced to part from her friends and family; her unhappiness in India was exacerbated by a nearly six-year separation from their small son and daughter.
Conventional wisdom decreed that children thrived best in an English climate, so the Kiplings sent Rudyard and Trix, aged 5 and 3, to live with a family in Southsea. Rudyard's devastating short story ''Baa Baa, Black Sheep,'' about a little boy who suffers great cruelty and neglect at the hands of his English guardians, told the world what he thought of his parents' act. But Flanders shows that Alice suffered too. She missed her children terribly and no doubt would have removed them if she had known the full extent of Rudyard's misery.

Although Alice tried to reconstitute the ''family square'' when parents and children were finally reunited, the wounds never truly healed. After Rudyard married Caroline Balestier, she expended a great deal of energy keeping him away from his father and mother. Alice Kipling fared little better with her daughter, the mercurial Trix, who suffered recurring bouts of insanity after her marriage.

Following a long and unheralded stint as principal of the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay, John Kipling finally achieved recognition when the Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria's third son, commissioned him to design an Indian-themed billiard room. Until then, Alice had endured the ignominy of being the poor relation of her more successful sisters. But 20 years of scraping around the fringes of Anglo-Indian society left their mark. By middle age, she had become a hard-edged and critical woman.

Agnes and Louisa Macdonald did not leave behind as many documentary traces as their sisters. Nothing of Agnes's writings remains, and Louisa's letters are in an archive Flanders was refused permission to consult. She maneuvers around these large holes in her narrative by turning her book into a family saga, with grandparents, children, cousins and friends all trotted out to fill the void. For the last hundred pages, all four sisters recede into the background.

''A Circle of Sisters'' was first published in England in 2001. During the intervening years, Flanders wrote a superb second book, the highly acclaimed ''Inside the Victorian Home,'' which came out in the United States last year. The reversal of order is not to her advantage. ''A Circle of Sisters'' is a slight, charming book, best regarded as a chef's amuse-bouche before the main meal.

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'Models of Womanhood' by Hilary Spurling
Daily Telegraph 2001

''WOMEN ought to be locked up," said the painter Edward Burne-Jones. "In some place where we could have access to them but they couldn't get out from." It was the dream of high Victorian womanhood which he had spent his life painting, and which his wife and her sisters lived out in actuality. The name of the place in those days was marriage. Burne-Jones was 17 in 1850 when he met his future wife, the 10-year-old Georgiana Macdonald, one of the five daughters of a Methodist minister. He proposed to her five years later on June 9, the day Dante first saw Beatrice, marrying her on the same day five years after that. Georgie was tiny, with the delicate oval face, dark hair and grey eyes familiar from countless Madonnas and maidens in her husband's pictures. She enchanted his friends. Rossetti made a ravishing drawing of her, William Morris became her lifelong admirer, Ruskin was bowled over by Ned's "little country violet". Georgie's only problem was that she wanted to be an artist or a writer, like them. They welcomed her warmly into the life of the studio until the arrival of her first child. She never forgot the sense of exile she got from hearing the men talking and laughing behind the studio's closed door, "while I sat with my son on my knee and dropped selfish tears upon him . . ." From now on the most she could do was copy her husband's work on to woodblocks, tiles and cushion covers. "I can't imagine anything prettier or more wifely," Ruskin wrote approvingly: "there is just the proper quantity of echo in it."

The dustjacket of A Circle of Sisters shows Georgie at 24, pregnant with her second child, seated on the grass reading to a circle of her sisters in Burne-Jones's Green Summer. All have the drowsy, virginal, unfocused look of girls in waiting, like ripe, heavy, unpicked fruit. Georgie herself said that this period marked the end of her youth (her second son was born prematurely when she caught scarlet fever that winter: she narrowly survived but the baby died). Shortly afterwards, her husband embarked on a sensational affair that ended in public suicide attempts and police intervention with all of London agog. From then on, Burne-Jones was never without a young girl to tend to what his wife called "the spirit of eternal youth" that increasingly weakened his grasp of reality in middle and old age. "This me, which grows old, goes to look at it sometimes," Georgie wrote, after a quarter of a century of marriage, "unlocks the garden, unseals the fountain, and then, having seen that the spirit is still there, closes both again, and goes on its way. "Georgie solved her difficulties with a characteristically effective compromise, becoming a socialist parish councillor, going on to write her husband's Life and outlive him by 20 years. She was the most formidable and best-loved of the four siblings in Judith Flanders's book. The others tackled the same problems differently. The youngest, Louisa, started out as a strikingly bold and talented child, spending whole days painting in the studio Burne-Jones shared with Morris, delighting both with her relish for blood and violence. Louie married at 21 a prosperous iron-founder called Alfred Baldwin, bore him an only child the next year, and promptly took to her bed. As soon as he could walk, her son, Stanley, was fetching cushions for his mother and imitating her by playing at invalids himself. Throughout his youth she remained mostly bedridden with unspecified ailments. When he was old enough to leave for university, his mother mysteriously recovered, leaving her bed to embark on a highly successful career as a romantic novelist.Agnes, the brightest and prettiest of the sisters, also succumbed to ill health on her marriage, to the painter Edward Poynter, who ended up simultaneously Director of the National Gallery, President of the Royal Academy and First Curator of the Tate Gallery. Poynter was a safe pair of hands who could be trusted not to squander money on French Impressionist painters, or dubious masters such as Goya: "coarse and vulgar to a degree", said Poynter, urging his trustees to leave shaping the collections to him. "You may be sure if I want it, it is a good picture." He was made a baronet by a grateful nation while his wife dimmed and died.Alice, the eldest of the Macdonald sisters, married an art teacher called Lockwood Kipling and bore a son, Rudyard, whose fame as a writer outpaced even the success of his cousin Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister. The four sisters could hardly have fulfilled their sole permitted function, as wives and mothers, with more spectacular success. This rich, intelligent and entertaining book assesses both their achievements and the price they paid with unexpected post-feminist generosity.

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'Reader, they married them' by Kathryn Hughes
Daily Telegraph 2001

THE Macdonald sisters were not a particularly promising crew. Pretty, but not beautiful, bright but not educated, as daughters of a Methodist minister they could hardly be counted the last word in glamour. Yet the four girls who were born between 1837 and 1845 (the family numbered eight in all) ended up far away from the dusty life of the provincial chapel into which they had been born.This being mid-Victorian Britain, the Macdonalds' social transformation came about through their relationships with important or interesting men. Alice Macdonald married an art teacher, followed him to India, and gave birth to Rudyard Kipling. Georgiana married the painter Edward Burne-Jones and ended up with a title (although as a lifelong radical, she felt awkward about it).Agnes married Edward Poynter who managed to get most of the British art establishment under his control (at one point he was running the Royal Academy and the National Gallery as well as the Tate). And Louisa married the wealthy Midlands industrialist Alfred Baldwin, and produced the good, kind boy who would eventually become the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin.

Although their story sounds superficially like a female version of one of those rags-to-riches tales so beloved by early-Victorian moralists, the Macdonald sisters did not live happily ever after. From the moment they left home (described as "a moving tent" thanks to the custom of shifting ministers around the country every three years) they seem to have found their husbands difficult and their children disappointing. Ned Burne-Jones may have been a fine painter and a charming man, but he led Georgie a horrible dance with his long, anguished love affairs with other women. Their son Phil was a weak, lonely snob while his sister Margaret was just plain odd (she made her husband turn down the mastership of Balliol because she did not want to move away from her father in Fulham). The other sisters fared little better. Alice Kipling may have been hugely proud of her son's success as a writer, but she had to cope with a daughter-in-law who saw it as her job to keep "Ruddy" as far away from his mother as possible. Louisa Baldwin took to her bed for months at a time, perhaps because her husband, though well-behaved, was rather dull - at one stage she was dosing herself with a bottle of champagne a day. Agnes may have become "Lady Poynter", but she had to endure her husband's deep depressions, not to mention her sons' disappointing careers (they were always leaning on assorted Kiplings and Baldwins for the next job).

Judith Flanders is very good at understanding how families work. With an acute eye, she charts the constant shifts of allegiance and distance that marked the Macdonald siblings' relationships with one another. They were not, on the whole, very good at talking to each other. Instead, their most pressing needs and wounding hurts were expressed through small, unspoken acts. In 1866 Alice, for instance, took well over two months before she got round to writing to her sisters to congratulate them on their marriages. And when Harry, the disappointing eldest brother, moved to America, there was a tacit agreement to pretend that he had never existed. Where Flanders is less good, however, is in her understanding of the historical background to the Macdonalds' story, at times resorting to generalisations about "Victorian women" that are blunt and old-hat. This is odd because she is interested in the bigger picture, shoe-horning a great deal of extraneous detail into her narrative (she insists on telling us, for example, how much money a household could make from its waste paper, and just how long mourning should last).Unfortunately, though, Flanders misunderstands the nature of many of her sources, reading prescriptive literature as if it were a description of how people actually lived. Recent work by professional historians has revealed that the slew of housekeeping "how-to" books, which came onto the market in mid-Victorian Britain, tell us more about the fantasies and aspirations of the middle classes than about their everyday reality. The effect of taking these sources as gospel is much the same as a writer 100 years hence assuming that a large number of British women in the early 21st century were busy being Domestic Goddesses.

These difficulties aside, A Circle of Sisters is a good debut effort. Flanders shows herself equal to the tricky business of keeping all the threads of her story going (made doubly confusing by the Victorians' habit of giving everyone in a family the same name). What the book lacks in historical understanding it makes up for in its sharp awareness of family dynamics and the realisation that some things, at least, never change.