Pride and Pleasure: The Revolutionary World of the Schuyler Sisters

Women of the founding generation cope with war, infidelity, and catastrophic duels while claiming their own agency in this luxuriant dual biography of Alexander Hamilton’s wife Elizabeth Schuyler and her sister Angelica. Journalist Vaill (Hotel Florida) paints the Hamilton marriage as a love match between a smart, forthright Elizabeth and a charming but prickly Hamilton, whose sharp tongue touched off several challenges before the duel with Aaron Burr that killed him. Elizabeth dutifully served as sounding board and amanuensis for Hamilton, but it wasn’t until her 50-year widowhood that she came into her own, clawing her way to financial stability and curating Hamilton’s papers. Angelica cuts a more glamorous figure: she infuriated her father by eloping with John Church, a shady English war profiteer, and enjoyed decades as a prominent socialite until Church went bankrupt; along the way she enchanted Thomas Jefferson and hatched a plot to rescue the Marquis de Lafayette from an Austrian prison. Vaill insistently suggests that Angelica had a romance with Hamilton, citing their flirtatious letters, but since Elizabeth herself was party to the banter, the claim seems like an overreading. Still, Vaill’s richly textured portrait convincingly styles the Schuyler sisters as quiet revolutionaries: while holding down the domestic sphere, they led significant public lives and defied male authority. It’s an elegant and entertaining account of the surprisingly modern lives of founding women. (Oct.)