“All women are born and remain daughters” is how novelist, journalist, historian, and member of the well-known Sackville-West family, Juliet Nicolson, opens ‘A House Full of Daughters’. It’s a study of the lives of seven generations of women in her family that traces time, place, and century-old family wounds. It’s also a historical feast, as, through diary entries and family records, the author meets her ancestors during various time periods: Malaga in the mid-1800s, Washington DC at the turn of the nineteenth century, and New York in the 1980s. Her journey confronts the painful patterns that have transcended time, such as childbirth trauma, alcoholism, jealousy, and infidelity (namely the famous affair that her Grandmother Vita had with Virginia Woolf). Ending with an ode to her Granddaughter and the future, ‘House Full of Daughters’ is honest, absorbing, and an emotional reminder of the woman who made us who we are. IM

Published by Chatto & Windus