Anne Sebba
Matriarchs & Money
The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty
By Natalie Livingstone
John Murray 480pp £25
Within a year of Amschel Mayer Rothschild’s wife, Eva, dying in 1848, the childless septuagenarian announced at a family dinner that he intended to remarry and that his bride would be Julie, his eighteen-year-old great-niece. As Natalie Livingstone comments in this absorbing portrait of several generations of Rothschild women, the fact that the old man, one of five sons of the Frankfurt-born founder of the banking dynasty, was in a position to make this outrageous claim to a teenager ‘and be met only with silence and blushes speaks to the disturbing power of the Rothschild men over the women of the family’.
Julie eventually escaped Amschel’s clutches after a male relative objected to the proposed marriage. What Livingstone makes clear from the first chapters of her riveting revisionist study is that the Rothschild wives and sisters did much more than simply produce offspring, although they did plenty of that and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
How to ruin a film - a short guide by @TWHodgkinson:
Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer
Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey
literaryreview.co.uk
How to ruin a film - a short guide by @TWHodgkinson:
Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer
Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey
literaryreview.co.uk
Give the gift that lasts all year with a subscription to Literary Review. Save up to 35% on the cover price when you visit us at https://literaryreview.co.uk/subscribe and enter the code 'XMAS24'