A House Full of Daughters review – fascinating family memoir

An engrossing study of seven generations of Juliet Nicolson’s literary family

 

 

 

 

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 The poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Juliet Nicolson’s grandmother, pictured in 1919. Photograph: Getty Images

Anita Sethi

Sunday 19 March 2017 The Observer

 

“Nothing has really happened unless it is written down,” the author’s father was fond of telling her, quoting Virginia Woolf whose letters he edited. This engrossing book charts seven generations of a family who were obsessive documenters of their lives through diaries, letters, memoirs and autobiographical novels. But Nicolson – the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West – probes the premise too, questioning the subjectivity of memory, the fleeting nature of occurrences, and experiences beyond the remit of expression. Focusing on the women in her family, she grapples with that which has still neither been written down or said, eloquently exploring the silences.
 Nicolson notices many patterns emerging through the generations, some that she finds disturbing – secrets that parents kept from children, a fear of intimacy, a “lack of self-worth and self-belief”, a slipping into loneliness and isolation, and “numbing unhappiness in an addictive dependence on drink, money and sex.  MORE