The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

Author: Michelle Lovric

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-08-12

Total Pages: 688

ISBN-13: 1620400154

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It's rural Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Pre-Raphaelites, when Europe burns with a passion for long, flowing locks. So when seven sisters, born into fatherless poverty, grow up with hair cascading down their backs, to their ankles, and beyond, men are not slow to recognize their potential. Soon, they're a singing and dancing septet: Irish jigs kicked out in dusty church halls. But it is not their singing or their dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. In an Ireland still hungry and melancholy with the Great Famine, the Swiney hair is a rich offering. And their hair will take dark-hearted Darcy, bickering twins Berenice and Enda, plain Pertilly, gentle Oona, wild Ida, and fearful, flame-haired Manticory-the writer of their on- and off-stage adventures-out of poverty, through the dance halls of Ireland, to the salons of Dublin and the palazzi of Venice. It will bring them suitors and obsessive admirers, it will bring some of them love and each of them loss. For their past trails behind the sisters like the tresses on their heads and their fame and fortune will come at a terrible price. Rich in period detail, peopled by a bewitching cast of characters, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is a tale of exploitation and celebrity, illegitimacy and sibling rivalry, love triangles and financial skullduggery, of death and devilry. And a very great deal of hair.


Those Wild Wyndhams

Those Wild Wyndhams

Author: Claudia Renton

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 542

ISBN-13: 1101874309

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The three dazzlingly beautiful, wildly rich Wyndham sisters, part of the four hundred families that made up Britain's ruling class, at the center of cultural and political life in late-Victorian/Edwardian Britain. Here are their complex, idiosyncratic lives; their opulent, privileged world; their romantic, roiling age. They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men--or men of great prominence...Mary Wyndham, wilder than her wild brothers; lover of Wilfrid Blunt, confidante of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (the Balfour Declaration); married to Hugo, Lord Elcho; later the Countess of Wemyss...Madeline Adeane, the quietest and happiest of the three...and Pamela, spoiled, beautiful, of the three, possesser of the true talent, wife of the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey (later Viscount Grey), who took Britain into the First World War. They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square, and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age," designed, in 1876, by the visionary architect, Philip Webb; the model for Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton. They were bred with the pride of the Plantagenets and raised with a fierce belief that their family was exceptional. They avoided the norm at all costs and led the way to a blending of aristocracy and art. Their group came to be called The Souls, whose members from 1885 to the 1920s included the most distinguished politicians, artists, and thinkers of their time. In Those Wild Wyndhams, Claudia Renton gives us a dazzling portrait of one of England's grandest, noblest families. Renton captures, with nuance and depth, their complex wrangling between head and heart, and the tragedy at the center of all their lives as the privilege and bliss of the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian era, the Great War, and the passing of an opulent world.


A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2008-09-18

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 074758589X

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A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love


Hotel Splendid

Hotel Splendid

Author: Marie Redonnet

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1994-09

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13:

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The woman who owns the once proud Hotel Splendid is burdened with the care of her sickly and selfish sisters, and is forced to battle the elements as her now-decaying hotel is about to be swallowed up by an encroaching swamp


The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters

The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters

Author: Lora Ann QuiƱonez

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780877228653

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"This is a book about change and about people changing. It is a book abaout women, American Catholic sisters, in passage. It tells of the radical transformation that has been underway among sisters for the past four decades, redefining their identities and their way of life." [Preface].