Pride and Pleasure - by Amanda Vaill (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN BIOGRAPHY
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY

"Marvelous . . . An act not only of recovery, but of world building." --The Atlantic

"A thoroughly fascinating biography, filled with Vaill's signature warmth, humor and insight." --The New York Times Book Review

"Elegantly written, intimately detailed and infused with feeling, a gripping account of these two remarkable women, their elite family and their tumultuous era." --The Wall Street Journal

"One of our great biographers takes the sisters out of Hamilton's supporting cast and puts them front and center." --Town & Country

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.

If it hadn't been for the Revolutionary War, things might have been very different for the two women Alexander Hamilton came to describe as his "dear brunettes." Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, daughters of colonial Hudson Valley aristocracy, would have followed their family's expectations, making dynastic marriages and supervising substantial households--but they didn't. Instead, they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain, and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each sister was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.

Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment in attachments to powerful men, eloped with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career; but after his appointment as America's first treasury secretary, she was challenged by the public and private controversies that plagued him--not least of all the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.

When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one was deprived of her animating spirit, while the other gained a new, self-determined life.

Drawing on deep archival research, 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 loyalties and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life.

Review Quotes

"Marvelous . . . An act not only of recovery, but of world building . . . Vaill's historical and literary achievement is to convey what it felt like to be a woman who, as she writes of Angelica, longed 'to put her fingertips to history, ' even if she touched it only softly."
--Jane Kamensky, The Atlantic

"A thoroughly fascinating biography, filled with Vaill's signature warmth, humor and insight."
--Jennifer Wright, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

"Elegantly written, intimately detailed and infused with feeling, a gripping account of these two remarkable women, their elite family and their tumultuous era."
--Julia M. Klein, The Wall Street Journal

"Superb . . . Amanda Vaill achieves what is for biographers a difficult balance between biography and history. She manages never to forsake a sense of the world in which these women operated."
--Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

"Hamilton may have brought attention to the elder sisters' romantic rivalry, but theirs was also a much longer story of philanthropy, political engagement and a young country shifting beneath their feet."
--The New York Times

"In this in-depth look at the public and private lives of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler (and . . . Peggy?), one of our great biographers takes the sisters out of Hamilton's supporting cast and puts them front and center. Here, we see how two formidable characters who came from the same heavyweight New York family learned to wield their power and influence in very different ways that would impact their country for generations to come."
--Town & Country

"[A] luxuriant dual biography . . . Vaill's richly textured portrait [is] an elegant and entertaining account of the surprisingly modern lives of founding women."
--Publishers Weekly

"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. Amanda 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 eighteenth- and nineteenth-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, author of American Eden (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award)

"In a triumph of vivid storytelling built on excavation of myriad never-seen sources, Amanda Vaill resurrects and restores to history 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 only 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

"A tremendous feat of induction, managing as it does to tell most of the history of the Revolution and early republic through the lives of Eliza Hamilton and Angelica Church, two sisters within the endlessly fertile and politically busy Schuyler family of upstate New York. Written with grace and authority, Pride and Pleasure depicts a vast range of consequential conduct, private and public, and it always puts the reader right 'in the room where it happens.'"
--Thomas Mallon, author of Fellow Travelers and Henry and Clara

"Amanda Vaill has given the Schuyler sisters their long-overdue retrieval from the footnotes of Alexander Hamilton's story. Here, they are formidable women navigating love, loss, power, and purpose in revolutionary America, not simply witnesses to history, but the makers and shapers of it, too. This is biography as it should be--unsparing, elegant, and utterly enthralling."
--Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

About the Author

Amanda Vaill is the author of the biographies Hotel Florida, Somewhere, and the bestselling Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, and her journalism and criticism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Town & Country, and New York. A past fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.