THE WOMEN OF ROTHSCHILD
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS DYNASTY NATALIE LIVINGSTONE
John Murray, 480pp, £25
‘My heart sank when I received this book: it looked too beautiful to be serious,’ wrote Abigail Green in the
Times Literary Supplement. ‘Yet within a couple of chapters, I was hooked.’ Green pointed out that ‘every Rothschild history relishes the fact that while her children and grandchildren lived grandly in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, Gutle [the original matriarch] never left the modest home she and her husband had shared in Frankfurt’, but that ‘no Rothschild history I have read thinks to put Gutle centre-stage’. In Livingstone’s book ‘she emerges as a person, not a trope: fielding questions from the police during the Napoleonic occupation, hiring a follower of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to educate the younger children, and worrying about her daughters’ prospects.’
Women were ‘a vital component of the family’s soft power’
In the patriarchal structure of the Rothschild family, the women were ‘a vital component of the family’s soft power’, wrote Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times. They were not permitted to join the family banking business, but they instead made their mark as political hostesses and philanthropists and later as activists, academics or patrons of the arts. ‘The only thing missing in this otherwise hugely entertaining book is any discussion of the downside of all that money – yes, it conveyed great freedom and privilege, but, like being a member of a royal family, it must colour the way everyone treats you. Otherwise, this is a fascinating story, stylishly told.’
In what Mail on Sunday reviewer Kathryn Hughes called a ‘scintillating family saga’, Livingstone ‘reveals that the Rothschild ladies were, if anything, even more extraordinary than their fathers, brothers and husbands... Several of the women in this book played a key part in helping families escape from Hitler’s Holocaust. Later, some of them contributed to the setting up of Israel. With consummate skill, Livingstone weaves together all these threads, the dark as well as the light, and the result is both thrilling and moving.’