Judith Flanders argues that families and domestic life are the two most important influences in our lives. Yet until recently these have always been treated in a subsidiary way by biographers, or relegated to the pages of fiction: "They are women's topics, not important enough in the big male world for full-scale treatment." While considering the life of one family - the Macdonalds - Flanders also shows the way that middle-class families in general lived in the Victorian period, and how this influenced them. This works well, adding a documentary interest.
One gleans some extraordinary facts - for example, before the invention of the S-bend in the 1860s it was impossible to have sanitary drainage indoors without the risk of an overpowering stench. A large house could use up to a ton of coal a month in as many as 14 fireplaces. Diet, medical practices, servants and income are all closely examined.
The Macdonald sisters were the children of a Methodist minister, George Macdonald, and his wife Hannah. Their background was middle class but they were neither wealthy nor well-connected. Yet all four were wives or mothers of famous men.
Alice was the mother of Rudyard Kipling, Georgiana was the wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, Agnes married Edward Poynter, a more conventional artist who went on to become director of the National Gallery and president of the Royal Academy, and Louisa was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, who served three terms as Prime Minister of England, and was given an earldom.
The sisters were not outstandingly brilliant. It is not suggested that they were responsible in any direct way for the success of their husbands or sons. They shared a respect for art and learning, and while they were not impressed by wealth, neither did they look down on business. They were not particularly close; each in her own way was a rather chilly person, remote and restrained even by the standards of the time.
While including the whole family - eight of 11 children survived - Flanders concentrates chiefly on Alice and Georgiana, strong characters who showed more initiative than the average Victorian matron. Agnes and Louisa come across as passive, conventional women. Louisa published some three-volume novels and some verse, both apparently undistinguished, while Alice wrote some journalism and acted as a literary sounding board for the young Rudyard.
Methodist preachers were regularly relocated, and the girls grew up mainly in the English midlands, with one long stay in London. Edward Burne-Jones (Ned Jones, as he was then) was a schoolfriend of Georgiana's brother in Birmingham, and later they were at Oxford together. He and Georgiana married in 1860, and she sounds like a far more interesting person than her husband. Her close friendship with William Morris outlasted her husband's, and George Eliot was another good friend. The marriage never recovered from Burne-Jones's infatuation with the great beauty, Mary Zambaco.
Georgiana held strong socialist beliefs to the end of her life. As a widow, she was one of the first women elected to a parish council, after the Local Government Act of 1894 had enfranchised married women. Once married and settled in England, Rudyard Kipling preferred the company of his aunt, Georgie, to that of his mother, Alice.
Alice had remained a spinster for another five years after Georgiana was wed, eventually marrying Lockwood Kipling at the age of 28. Alice was known for her quickness of mind and her acerbic wit. "Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room," said Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy of India.
The young Rudyard Kipling is such a colourful, energetic character that he could easily have unbalanced the biography. But in the same way that she manages a well-balanced account of the much-discussed circle consisting of Ruskin, Morris, Rosetti and Burne-Jones, Flanders refrains from too many Kipling anecdotes.
Flanders follows her cast as far as the marriages of the sisters' children. Georgiana's daughter became the popular novelist Angela Thirkell, and Thirkell's son was the more radical novelist, Colin MacInnes. He is given the last word on the Macdonald sisters: "If they were inspiring people, they were also appallingly demanding. They were, in fact, the sort of family that one would perhaps rather read about than belong to." Judith Flanders's wit, background knowledge and general good judgment make reading about them a most enjoyable experience.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic