Women of Privilege: 100 Years of Love and Loss in a Family of the Hudson River Valley (Paperback)

Susan Gillotti (author)

£21.50

Paperback 304 Pages / Published: 30/05/2013

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Synopsis

Women of Privilege traces the decline of a once-privileged Hudson River Valley family where the neighbours were Vanderbilts, Delanos, and Roosevelts. Susan Gillotti provides us an insight into her ancestors' heretofore secret lives, culled from private diaries, letters, and journals of the three generations of women who inhabited Grasmere - one of the great houses of the Hudson River Valley. On the surface, their lives seem ideal, but beneath that facade, there was mental illness, alcoholism, yearning for divorce, and questions of sexual identity.

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
ISBN: 9780897337243
Number of pages: 304
Weight: 399 g
Dimensions: 215 x 141 x 18 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

"Using a treasure trove of family records, Susan Gillotti relates with wonderful details the challenges that faced the upper class women in her family from the latter decades of the nineteenth century until the late twentieth. The book offers readers a look at the beautiful Hudson River Valley, but we also learn about the lives of prosperous Americans in east coast cities, at elite schools, and in Europe. This is a riveting and moving family story, which, quite literally, I could not put down."
- Miriam Cohen, Evalyn Clark Professor of History, Vassar College

"Susan Gillotti opens the door of this great house to explore the lives and turmoil within. "Women of Privilege" is a riveting read--one cannot stop until the final outcome of these powerful, but flawed, lives is revealed. Equally compelling is that the telling of these personal dramas is based on a wealth of conserved letters, diaries, and other documentation."

-- Peter H. Brink, former senior vice president, Programs, National Trust for Historic Preservation

"In the context of a family unraveling from the American Golden Age through five generations, Susan Gillotti weaves dispassionately from journals and letters, without judgment, the stories of her mother and grandmothers, bravely, sometimes desperately, trying to claim their independence from social straight jackets, and succeeding in Gillotti's voice."

-- Georgina Forbes, Artist