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It is May 1851 and the opening day of the Great Exhibition at Paxton's magnificent Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park. Rich and poor have flocked there - to see the Palace, to see the Duke of Wellington, to see the Queen ...
George Vestrey, Tory Member of Parliament, wealthy doyen of the Victorian ruling class, is there with his family. But secure and safe though the titled Vestreys may seem, the family is about to be torn apart.
The eldest Vestrey girls, the daughters of the house, epitomize the many changes that are happening to society in England. Pretty, flirtatious Emily will join the Royal Household as a maid-of-honour to Queen Victoria; rebel Jane models for the Pre-Raphaelites, and to the horror of her family begins an affair with a dangerous Revolutionary who introduces her to the exiled Karl Marx; Caroline, outwardly the most conventional, will tear herself painfully from caring for a sickly mother to join Florence Nightingale as a nurse in the Crimean War. Her soldier brothers also go to the war, and she and Emily vie with each other for the affections of the same man. But on this day in 1851, none of them knows the future.
The Daughters of the House is a story of love and change - of a family whose conflicts in peace and war mirror the conflicts of Victorian society and of England itself. In its portrayal of a family and the aspirations of the three eldest daughters, spirited young women yearning to free themselves from social conventions, this powerful novel illuminates our past, and the way in which the past has shaped our present.
Genre: Historical
George Vestrey, Tory Member of Parliament, wealthy doyen of the Victorian ruling class, is there with his family. But secure and safe though the titled Vestreys may seem, the family is about to be torn apart.
The eldest Vestrey girls, the daughters of the house, epitomize the many changes that are happening to society in England. Pretty, flirtatious Emily will join the Royal Household as a maid-of-honour to Queen Victoria; rebel Jane models for the Pre-Raphaelites, and to the horror of her family begins an affair with a dangerous Revolutionary who introduces her to the exiled Karl Marx; Caroline, outwardly the most conventional, will tear herself painfully from caring for a sickly mother to join Florence Nightingale as a nurse in the Crimean War. Her soldier brothers also go to the war, and she and Emily vie with each other for the affections of the same man. But on this day in 1851, none of them knows the future.
The Daughters of the House is a story of love and change - of a family whose conflicts in peace and war mirror the conflicts of Victorian society and of England itself. In its portrayal of a family and the aspirations of the three eldest daughters, spirited young women yearning to free themselves from social conventions, this powerful novel illuminates our past, and the way in which the past has shaped our present.
Genre: Historical
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