“Judith Flanders has driven a four horse chariot through the nineteenth century. In telling the story of the four Macdonald sisters she has brilliantly illuminated the world of Victorian England. I have enjoyed this book more than I can say.” —John Julius Norwich The Macdonalds were both of their own time and yet our contemporaries. In the personal and social journeys they made they were creatures of an exceptional moment in history, a social drama set in a privileged time and place, while in the ordinary dynamics of their relationships with each other they were us. The dynamism of family life mirrored the times. From the birth of Alice soon after Queen Victoria came to the throne, to their dispersal at the end of a long Edwardian summer, the Macdonalds were a prime example of the fluidity and social mobility that characterized the age.