Books like Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson

The Letters of Vita Sackville‑West to Virginia Woolf compiles over 500 intimate letters spanning 1922‑1941, revealing the courtship, daily life, and literary pursuits of two of England's most celebrated women authors.

An intimate autobiographical account of Jessica Mitford’s life, tracing her childhood in an eccentric Upper‑class English family, her rebellious youth, and her transatlantic adventures, culminating in wartime loss.

The Mitford sisters and their tumultuous lives between the wars.

"Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention."--Back cover.

Contains primary source material.

Harriet Martineau’s autobiography offers a detailed, sensitive chronicle of a 19th‑century English woman whose work spanned sociology, economics, and social reform.

Lyndall Gordon defends Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759‑1797, founder of modern feminism, by painting her vibrant portrait and correcting her historical reputation.

Isobel Grundy is the first to examine in detail Lady Mary's family situation and social relationships, or to situate Montagu's writing life in relation to both tradition and innovation, to enlightenment circles and political agendas, and to the emerging tradition of women's writing, in which she herself was a key figure. Grundy highlights Lady Mary's adolescent longing for literary fame, her growing understanding of the pressures of class and gender imperatives on such upstart desires, her conflicted negotiations with manuscript culture and the new world of print, the punitive responses of society, the deep dissonance at every stage of her life between her actual circumstances and the constructed self of her letters and other writings. She also situates Montagu's work in the context of her exceptionally wide reading in both men's and women's texts, and her own theorizing of her social world.

A humorous guide that imagines how the famous Mitford sisters might handle today's world, drawing on rare interviews to offer advice on parties, fashion and staying youthful.