Juliet Nicolson comes from a family in which, as she explains at the beginning of this honest book, the “habit of writing down the story of our lives has long been a tradition”. Her great-grandmother Victoria Sackville-West left behind a great many volumes of diaries, her grandmother Vita Sackville-West published several books about the family, and her father Nigel Nicolson wrote and edited several volumes about or written by his parents. So A House Full of Daughters joins a long line of publications about an extraordinary family, but it still manages to be original and illuminating. Nicolson focuses on seven generations of women – from the passionate Spanish Pepita to her own granddaughter, Imogen, born in 2013. The book is about daughters and mothers, about abandonment, secrets and jealousy, about a sense of belonging to a place as well as its creation of loneliness. It is also about those fathers who turned out to be the more reliable and loving parent.
The story begins in 1830 with Nicolson’s great-great-grandmother, Pepita, born into the poverty-stricken backstreets of Málaga. Pepita, who would become a famous flamenco dancer, married her teacher, but her devoted Gypsy mother, Catalina, was jealous and destroyed their marriage. She fell in love with Lionel Sackville-West, a British diplomat and heir to the childless Lord Sackville who owned Knole in Kent. Pepita and Lionel had five children but never married. After her death, Lionel placed them in schools and saw them rarely. Then in late 1881, her 19-year-old daughter Victoria joined her father in Washington, effectively taking the role of his wife. Their relationship was close – united by their grief for Pepita – and Victoria became a much admired society hostess. Washingtonians adored her, the press was enchanted and President Chester Arthur proposed to her.
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