Customer Reviews

A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin

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This isn't something that I would recommend to every reader. The title sounds a lot more warm and fuzzy than the sisters were. If you are expecting a heart-warming tale of the days when all families were close and unfailingly took care of one another, this isn't it. One recommendation I would make is to look up the Rudyard Kipling, Stanley Baldwin, Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter in an encyclopedia, the Dictionary of National Biography or on the internet if they are not familiar. I say this not by way of faulting the book, there are too many characters to give each a full treatment, but it helps to have some idea of who these people were.

The book focuses on the daughters of a Methodist minister. Four either married men who became famous or had sons who became famous. Unfortunately, these are generally not terribly charming personalities, so it is no great delight getting to know them unless one is interested in the period or these particular people. But for those with a special interest, I think it will probably be quite interesting. There were also two brothers, one who was rather unsuccessful and one who was quite successful as a Methodist clergyman, but they take a back seat to their sisters both in the book and in the sisters' lives.

The one thing that I would have liked to have seen developed better is successful relations within the extended family. Georgiana Burne-Jones was very close to her nephew Rudyard, but I'm not really certain why. This may be a problem with a lack of sources on this particular point - Flanders can infer from guest books which relatives saw little of each other but more positive information would be necessary for this.

The MacDonald sisters: Alice, Georgiana, Agnes, Louisa and Edith, came from a modest, barely middle-class background. It is quite interesting that three of them married men from equally undistinguished roots, one a man who was perhaps upper middle-class. Despite these seemingly unpromising beginnings, two of the initally undistinguished husbands, Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter (married to Georgiana and Agnes, respectively) became very successful and famous in the field of art. The third husband, Lockwood Kipling, married to Alice, was successful in his field, and their son, Rudyard, would become an international literary success and quite wealthy. The fourth, husband, Alfred Baldwin, married to Louisa, was a model as an industrialist, noted for public service, who went into politics. Their son, Stanley Baldwin, was three time Prime Minister. Many of the less famous members of the family pursued successful careers as writiers, sometimes quite well known in their time. A few were failures as life: either suffering psychological problems, perhaps due to a frustration of their creative potential, or too comfortable as the children of the famous. Judith Flanders attempts to discover how nurture, i.e., being related to the MacDonalds, may have lead to the surprising achievements. I don't think that she really succeeds, not that I believe that we necessarily can ferret out these influences, but she does draw a probing picture of an interesting family. She considers not only the facts, but draws reasonable inferences about the human beings they refer to. She is quite clear about when she is speculating.

Flanders has done an enormous amount of research. There are many notes, a 12-page "Select Bibliography" and an index. There are eight pages of plates, with 45-50 well-selected pictures of the extended family. I particularly want to commend how the notes and index were done. The notes have both the chapter number and chapter running title, making it much easier to match them with the notes in the text. The index has brief explanatory notes in parentheses after the names of less important characters, e.g. (niece of so-and-so), which is often all that is needed, as well as cross-reference to variant names.

Probably not for everybody, but a excellent work for its subjects.

I read Ms. Flanders' previous work, "Inside the Victorian Home",(loved it) and therefore I was familiar with Ms. Flanders' writing style. Knowing the author's style helped me to enjoy CIRCLE OF SISTERS much more than if I had not first read Ms. Flanders previous book.

I guess what I'm eluding to is: Ms. Flander's "interesting" writing style. Her style is almost Edwardian,for lack of a better word. Her style can get rather dull in some parts of this book, but luckily, the various intertwining life-stories help the reader to pick up the pace.

If you want to read an intersting book about what life must have been like during the Victorian Era, and especially for four rather "unusual" sisters (ie: unusual for their time), then a reader may find this book quite fascinating, as I did.

The book starts off with a Geneology Tree showing where each sister, and how their respected mates and relatives, fit into the picture.

Then the book takes you back to grandfather MacDonald's life and how he and his wife rose to the challenges they encountered (eg: loneliness of a minister's wife, low pay, many moves).

Soon, the reader is taken to a description of each of the sisters. By the way, there were actually FIVE MacDonald sisters, but Edith, the youngest, never married and therefore she was only slightly talked about. The main plot actually evolves around the four older sisters,(Georgie, Agnes, Alice and Louisa) because these four "main" sisters ended-up marrying famous men (such as Rudyard Kipling's father) and had more exciting lives than poor Edith , who ended-up being the parents' caretaker and stayed home most of the time.

Each chapter of this book describes a "stage" in the sisters' lives (eg: meeting their mates, marriage, their children, infirmary, strange health issues, old age, death, etc.).

The author does a very nice job with even the slightest details of each sisters` life....Example, from what they wore and ate the day one sister met her future husband (eg: Alice was biting into an onion when first approached by John Lockwood Kipling in KIPLING PARK), to when another sister had to deal with infidelity (ie: Georgie's husband's affair).

The other interesting part of this book is that it describes, in detail, how each of the sisters' children felt and how each turned-out, in the long run! For instance, I think that readers will be quite surprised to learn, how Trix and Rudyard Kipling grew-up and how their personalities changed because of their environments and upbringing.

I don't want to say much more, because that might ruin the story, but I must say that after reading this book I knew more about the MacDonald sisters, the Victorian Era, and the sisters' relatives, than I had ever imagined.

very well written, deeply researched, the author inserts her own judgements of the sisters' behavior as we follow the timeline. not only do we see them grow up and older, but their lives mirror english society in the 19th century and they fortell our own 'aristocrats' of talent and celebrity. i like some sisters more than others, and the rudyard kipling portion especially was fascinating.

"Once is not enough," when it comes to how many readings it takes to do justice to Judith Flanders biography of 2001, A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: ALICE KIPLING, GEORGIANA BURNE-JONES, AGNES POYNTER AND LOUISA BALDWIN.

I got quite a lot from my first reading into the doings of a half dozen generations of the Macdonald family resident first in Skye, Scotland till 1746, then in Northern Ireland, then England, then in New York (in the case of Rudyard Kipling's ill-starred uncle Harry Macdonald).

I read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS primarily for fresh insights into the upbringing of Rudyard Kipling and his younger sister Trix. I knew them and their father John Lockhart Kipling and mother Alice Macdonald Kipling from other biographies. But I remained at sea on two points:

(1) why had father and mother Kipling not "boarded" their two very young offspring with their reasonably well-off parents or siblings when they dropped them off in England and returned to India where Lockhart was teaching art? and

(2) Why precisely had they sent Rudyard, after his miserable years in a boarding house (not school) to the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon? Biographer Flanders gives the best explanations I have seen so far. And some sort of explanation -- even speculative -- is surely needed to keep the senior Kiplings from appearing monsters for keeping their children a decade away from their homes and parents in India.

Nonetheless, I felt the unity of narration weaker than desirable at the end of reading one. Far too many people to keep straight!

On a second reading I paid more attention to the Chapter Groupings and gave them more credit as a unifying force:

I. Childhood (beginning back on the Isle of Skye in +/- 1746)
II. Marriage and Children (1859 - 1882)
III. Empty Nests (1882 - 1898)
IV. Old Age and Death (1898 - 1906).

I also studied in more detail the 50 or 60 excursuses by Judith Flanders into disease, illness and health care (constipation as Victorian curse!), heating and lighting houses, transportation by foot, coach and train and changes in women's fashions. These passages are worth reading on their own merit.

Finally, the author has a quirky but defensible, ostensibly original, slant on biographing. Let others focus on stand-alone geniuses or super achievers as if they pulled out everything valuable from their innards by personal prowess and true grit! Judith Flanders will show how genes, personal acquaintances, household amenities and challenges make the man -- or the woman. How else explain that four sisters, born barely middle class, would end up as mothers of a Nobel Prize winner for literature, a prime minister who died an Earl, and as wives of two leading British painters and art critics of the Victorian Age.

This book is not for skimming. But its author is on to something and nearly realizes her ambitious vision.

-OOO-

I enjoy bios tremendously this one was very thorough but I did have to "work" at it at times. But I was glad to learn what I did and I ultimately enjoyed it altho in truth it did not always "flow." I can appreciate all the work involved in researching all these lives so I am glad I could ultimately enjoy it.

Ms. Flanders' previous work, Inside the Victorian Home, was as delightful as it was informative. That's why A Circle of Sisters is such a letdown- its informative alright, if you care about a group of self-absorbed cold-natured odd ducks. (In 30 years, brother Harry received two visits from his loved ones. Sister Edie was disparaged as a failure for remaining unmarried, even as they all expected her to play nurse and nanny as their situations saw fit.)The subjects, including Rudyard Kipling, never quite come alive on the page. This may not be entirely Ms. Flanders' fault--there seems to have been an awful lot of letter burning in this family. (Plus its hard to feel empathy for people who kept their emotional lives so tightly buttoned down.) The writing, addtionally, is not as crisp as Inside the Victorian Home. You'll forget these women soon enough, and be glad you did.


That said, her book Inside the Victorian Home is excellent. I highly recommend it.