The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty
by Natalie Livingstone
480 pages, Hardcover
St. Martin’s Press
Expected publication date: 25 October 2022
Rating: 4 stars
The Rothschilds are a dynasty eponymous for wealth, but the women of the family have been long relegated to the shadows of history despite their major influence on English culture and society in their time.
The only thing I knew about the Rothschilds before reading this book was the myth about Nathan Rothschild making a treacherous fortune on the news of Waterloo. I had not considered the women of this family at all – which really is a shame, considering how fascinating they are.
In this book, Livingstone traces the lives of the Rothschild women who lived in England – the descendants of Nathan Mayer, who was one of the five brothers who established the family bank as an international entity. The women led fascinating lives, involving themselves in politics, charity, science, and even the family business despite a generation-long edict against female involvement. Despite the plethora of people discussed in the book, they were easy to tell apart due to the way the author strongly established their personalities.
However, the timeline of the book occasionally became confusing as we moved back and forth between the women being profiled in the different sections. I was also really disappointed that, after the level of detail in the first half of the book, some of the women in Parts III and IV were barely touched upon, though I am aware that this may have been due to the destruction of family papers that Livingstone referenced a few times throughout the book.
~
Description:
In The Women of Rothschild, Natalie Livingstone reveals the role of women in shaping the legacy of the famous Rothschild dynasty, synonymous with wealth and power.
From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty-first.
As Jews in a Christian society and women in a deeply patriarchal family, they were outsiders. Excluded from the family bank, they forged their own distinct dynasty of daughters and nieces, mothers and aunts. They became influential hostesses and talented diplomats, choreographing electoral campaigns, advising prime ministers, advocating for social reform, and trading on the stock exchange. Misfits and conformists, conservatives and idealists, performers and introverts, they mixed with everyone from Queen Victoria to Chaim Weizmann, Rossini to Isaiah Berlin, and the Duke of Wellington to Alec Guinness, as well as with amphetamine-dealers, suffragists and avant-garde artists. Rothschild women helped bring down ghetto walls in early nineteenth-century Frankfurt, inspired some of the most remarkable cultural movements of the Victorian period, and in the mid-twentieth century burst into America, where they patronized Thelonious Monk and drag-raced through Manhattan with Miles Davis.
Absorbing and compulsive, The Women of Rothschild gives voice to the complicated, privileged, and gifted women whose vision and tenacity shaped history.
~
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop. If you purchase a book using this link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you!
Malarkey Manor 