A Circle of Sisters

Different people will read for different reasons this uniquely conceived and structured, continuously narrated collection of biographies of several generations of the Macdonald family. I, for instance, read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS by Judith Flanders primarily for insights into Alice Kipling, nee Macdonald, mother of the Nobel Prize winning writer Rudyard Kipling. I also knew that young Rudyard and his even younger sister Trix loved and were greatly influenced and promoted socially by their Macdonald aunts, the by the increasingly successful men whom four of them married (three were important artists) and by the cousins they begot -- including Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. *** I had not realized going into A CIRCLE OF SISTERS how very original would be author Flander's structuring of her interlocking tale of several generations of a very creative family. Individuals, argues Judith Flanders, do not pop up out of nowhere. They are produced by families and live in houses. As fascinating as are the writers, painters, politicians (including one Prime Minister), equally so are the sketches of changes in household management, dining and in new clothing styles, modes of transportation, inventions and sanitary improvements that were incorporated into the daily lives of the rising middle classes of Ireland and England. *** Here are some examples bearing on living conditions and technological change: (1) In the 1840s a London inspector found homes with cellars three feet deep in human waste that had overflowed from cesspools. In 20 years cholera killed more than 30,000 people; a third cholera epidemic in 1854 killed 10,738 Londoners. (2) Most characters limned by Judith Flanders faced serious illness more than once. Thus Macdonald sister Louisa came down with smallpox; in 1864 her sister Georgiana took scarlet fever. (3) By 1878 there were electric lights (briefly) in London. But many still preferred candles or "unwholesome" gas light, with its smoke and "nauseous" smells. (4) The five sisters' mother Hannah Macdonald was a frugal Methodist minister's wife who had to move every few years with her growing brood. "Housekeeping took up and enormous amount of time. Even with the help of two servants, it was a heroic undertaking simple to keep a house clean. An average household burned a ton of coal every six weeks. ... the dirt thrown out by the fires was immense. Until the 1890s, coal rather than gas ranges were used in the kitchen for cooking, and heating water. ..." (There follows a long description of household chores involving cisterns and even pre-chemically cleaned laundry -- which "took three or four days out of every fortnight" and other examples of domestic labor.)(Ch 2). ***There may be as many as twenty such detailed passages in A CIRCLE OF SISTERS giving the ever evolving practices of private and public health, transportation by water and road, clothes making, fashion, mixing paints, and the like. I personally found this background material of enormous value.The Macdonald sisters lived in a harsher, cruder physical environment than we. A CIRCLE OF SISTERS also abounds with scores of sketches of painters, artists' models, poets, politicians and men and women about town who provided backdrop for the Kiplings and their more affluent in-laws. *** All in all A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is a very valuable book for its biographies and its vividly depicted milieux. I would not call it an easy read (the cast of characters is at times overwhelming to keep straight). But informative it unquestionably is, and very well written. -OOO-