Pride and Pleasure - by Amanda Vaill (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

America's Founding Era reconsidered through the lives of two women as formidable as, and in some respects stronger than, the men they loved, married, and mothered.

Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, born to wealth and privilege in New York's Hudson Valley during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were raised to make good marriages and supervise substantial households. Instead they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain--and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.

Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment through attachments to powerful men, eloped at twenty with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, first in Paris, then in London, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, one year her junior, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless illegitimate outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career. But after his appointment as America's first Treasury Secretary, she was challenged by the controversies in which he became involved, not the least of which was the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.

When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one deprived of her animating spirit, the other improbably gaining a new, self-determined life. "You would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun," wrote Angelica to Eliza, "but then [you would have missed] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions."

Drawing on deep archival research, including never-published records and letters, Amanda Vaill interweaves this family drama with its historical context, creating a narrative with the sweep and intimacy of a nineteenth-century novel. Full of battles and dinner parties, murky politics and transparent frocks, fierce loyalty and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life.

Review Quotes

"An engaging blend of perceptive biography and vivid narrative history." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Amanda Vaill has crafted an epic biography of America's Revolutionary Age--truly a Tolstoyan accomplishment, a sweeping narrative filled with love affairs, political intrigue and battlefield drama. The vibrant Schuyler sisters were not only feminist witnesses, but astute actors in the American Revolution. Vaill's work is a piece of revelatory biography at its best, deeply researched and wonderfully told." --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York City

"The Schuylers have their ideal biographer in Amanda Vaill, whose captivating, rich story reveals the revolutionary strength of women adroitly using their influence to shape and preserve the very history that later excluded them. This meticulously researched, beautifully written book brings these amazing women back to life with the fiery drama and brilliant insight they deserve - the full story behind the fascinating women in "Hamilton." --Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

"Pride and Pleasure is a marvel. Amanda Vaill has transmuted a prodigious amount of archival research into a brisk narrative that is both erudite and entertaining. Telling the stories of 18th- and 19th-century women--even those who were married to famous men--poses special challenges for the biographer, and Vaill has faced these challenges with style and ingenuity. The Schuyler sisters come alive in these pages, and they are delightful, instructive, dazzling company." --Victoria Johnson, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist for American Eden

"In a triumph of vivid storytelling built on excavation of myriad never seen sources, Amanda Vaill resurrects and restores two women at the center of our democracy's founding. Pride and Pleasure, is edge-of-your-seat novelistic, the story of the extraordinary and intertwining lives of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton and Angelica Schuyler Church, until now known as the two brilliant sisters who both loved Alexander Hamilton. As I read the final pages, I was as rejuvenated by the original dreams for our country as I was moved by Eliza Hamilton in her nineties, walking the streets of the new capital, in view of the monument to her old friend George Washington under construction. --Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

About the Author

Amanda Vaill is the author of Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War; the bestselling Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy--A Lost Generation Love Story, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography; and Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to writing the screenplay for the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning public television documentary Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, she has written features and criticism for many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar. She lives in New York City.