I received an ARC from the publisher. (Though it didn't arrive till after the publication date!)

A well-researched and well-written overview of many of the significant female members of the English branch of the Rothschild family. It's a bit overwhelming in both length and scope, but the writing is readable and engaging enough that it never feels like a chore to get through. It's really quite impressive how much the whole thing hangs together instead of feeling choppy or cobbled together.

The women of the Rothschild family, both those born into it and those who married into it, were interesting, vivid people, and their personalities are well drawn in this book. Livingstone is even-handed and clear-sighted about her subjects and about their (often complicated) relationships and foibles as well as their strengths and accomplishments.

The book ends up portraying the trajectory of possibilities for upper-class women through the 19th and 20th centuries. The women start out being bound by domestic concerns, then becoming society and (increasingly) political hostesses, pulling strings behind the scenes. They take on charitable and outright political work of the temperance/suffrage/poor relief kind, moving more and more center stage instead of behind the scenes. The 20th century women finally got to pursue careers; while Nica's role as a patron of American jazz is flashier, I was more impressed by Miriam's wide-ranging interests and accomplishments and Rosie's feminist criticism.

There's the usual stuff you can expect from family biographies of this sort--marriages both good and bad (though mostly bad, to be honest--whether they were arranged or chosen didn't seem to make much difference), tragedies and triumphs, feuds and forgiveness. It was sometimes difficult to hold who was who in my head as we moved from one generation into the next (and it was always difficult to keep any sort of understanding of the family tree!), but that was a necessary evil for a book with a scope as large as this one.

The question of the women's relationships to their own Jewishness surfaces and submerges throughout the book; I would have loved more of that, but given the lacuna in the records, that probably wasn't possible. I'm going to be spending a lot of time pondering the ways in which they were just like their Christian peers in the upper echelons of British society--and all the ways in which they very much were not.