Just what is a Southern belle, anyway? The received definition—a form of womanhood that is dainty, sugary, and demure—begins to totter on its foundations soon after one begins Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia. Lizzie, Irene, Nancy, Phyllis, and Nora Langhorne—whose lives spanned nearly a century, from 1867 to 1964—are renowned as the last of the Southern belles. They were “genealogically obsessed” like most Virginia gentry. They danced at fancy cotillions and racked up marriage proposals by the dozen. We notice, however, as James Fox takes us into the horsy and free-wheeling milieu in which this family grew up after the Civil War, that these women, coming at the end of a tradition, almost casually reshaped it to their liking.

Though it makes sense that the first female ever to fight her way to a seat in the British House of Commons would be an upstart American, it takes some explaining —and Fox does it wonderfully—to make it seem equally natural that the upstart in question should have been born and bred in the Old Dominion, last redoubt of the Southern patriarchy, as Nancy Langhorne Astor was. Nancy and her sisters were a “sectional” phenomenon, but one can see in them national traits, both good and bad. Therein lies the significance of this account by Fox, a journalist, author, and grandson of Phyllis Langhorne Brand. This family biography is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the complexities of race, class, nationality, and sexual politics in America and England from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

If we Americans are to be understood as having a national character, we can find its nature and sources illuminated here. One major source would have to be the “first families” of Virginia—or, to be more correct, those who claimed to be descended therefrom. Chiswell Dabney (“Chillie”) Langhorne, an impoverished country squire turned Reconstruction-era businessman, insisted to whoever would listen that his was an ancient lineage. And his sort could be just as snobby as the New England descendants of the Puritans. The difference Fox captures is that it was a snobbery unaccompanied by dourness. The New England hierarchs evinced Calvinist grimness. Not so the Virginia squirearchs. The institution of slavery left—in this respect, at least—an oddly light-hearted legacy. Fox writes that “there was nothing self-conscious about the way the Langhornes carried on” at Mirador, their antebellum, colonnaded house on the James River. They lived closely with their black servants, many of whom were former slaves,  

closely enough to inherit the religious feelings and diurnal superstitions of their black staff, and to adopt their particular humor and sense of the ridiculous.

While the male Langhorne children and the eldest daughter, Lizzie, mostly stayed at home (they are treated as minor players in the family saga), first Irene, and then Nancy and Phyllis, took over the debutante balls in Philadelphia and New York. They caught “the romantic Yankee eye” and fit neatly into “the northerners’ myth of the Old South.” With an almost nakedly mercenary zeal, all selected well-heeled Bostonians as husbands. (Of the three, only Irene would stay out of divorce court, however.)

The Langhornes would never have become famous if they had not ventured forth, and this, Fox says, was their father’s doing: “Chillie Langhorne’s instructions were contradictory: to be a Belle but also to make your own destiny.” The results were likewise contradictory. Henry James, a frequent guest at Nancy Langhorne Astor’s home in England, caught the essence of the contradiction when he noted that he found his hostess to be “but a reclaimed barbarian, with all her bounty, spontaneity and charm, too.” The novelist saw her as “fine material,” and no wonder. She had many of the qualities—not just “spunk,” but also a moralizing side—out of which James fashioned the “self-made girl” of his fictions. In his 1884 story “Pandora,” he created a kind of ironic fanfare around her emergence. Of Miss Pandora Day an excited society matron exclaims: “Why, she’s the new type. It has only come up lately. They have had articles about it in the papers.”

James anticipated by six years the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s creation of the wildly popular “Gibson Girl”—the pert, athletic figure who romped across newspaper cartoons, posters, and items of memorabilia, besting her tongue-tied (but charmed) beau at sports. The Langhorne connection with this pop-cultural icon is that the beautiful Irene Langhorne married Charles Dana Gibson in 1895 and conceived of herself, ever after, as the “Gibson Girl” incarnate. She lived so happily with Gibson in New York City that Fox consigns her to the second rank of characters. The biographer finds that Nancy and Phyllis Langhorne were more truly like the “Gibson Girl” than Irene was.

And not coincidentally, these two receive the lion’s share of attention in the book. They—and their feckless sister Nora, the baby of the family—make great copy because domestic turmoil and public controversy swirled about them. Why did Nancy and Phyllis Langhorne put an ocean between themselves and their beloved Mirador? Fox speculates that they left behind bad marriages and emigrated to England (supposedly “the Virginian’s natural second home”) because it was disgraceful to be a divorcée in America. They collected their children, shipped thoroughbreds over from Virginia, and “made their mark on English society on the hunting fields of Leicestershire.” They moved among royalty and began to disdain many of the Americans they bumped into on the transatlantic social circuit as Yankee philistines.

In England the suitors lined up, including noblemen. Phyllis would marry this time for love, but Nancy again chose someone bankable: an expatriated American who hadn’t lived in New York since his teens, the fabulously wealthy Waldorf Astor. Marriage was a matter of prudence for Nancy since “she would rather, quite literally, compete [against men] than flirt with them.” Her letters show a possessive attachment to Phyllis that interfered with her sister’s romances. It got so bad that the man Phyllis intended to take as her second husband, the British soldier and big game hunter Henry Douglas Pennant, had to send Nancy an admonitory letter:

Whether you like it or not she will love me alive or dead better than anything else, it is natural for woman to love man more intensely than for woman to love woman.

In the end, Phyllis did not treat Pennant well, as her grandson conveys unflinchingly. In a chapter that would be funny if it weren’t so awful, he examines the wartime correspondence between Phyllis, who was getting cold feet about the impending marriage, and Pennant, a captain fighting in the trenches of northeastern France. As the men around him were being mowed down, she discouraged him from accepting a transfer that would have ensured his physical survival. She was not literally responsible for the captain’s death in the allied assault near Neuve-Chapelle; still, here was self-serving behavior to make even Scarlett O’Hara blush.

Nancy steered her sister instead toward Bob Brand, a member of the Astors’ growing social set at Cliveden, their Restoration-baroque estate outside of London. Nancy was ambitious to gather about her her “intellectual betters,” regardless of social class or ideology. Brand—an excellent match for Phyllis, as it turned out—was part of an important group of young Tory diplomats and economists who had brokered the Boer War settlement in South Africa. Fox tells much of the English part of the Langhorne family story through the eyes of Brand, his maternal grandfather. He paraphrases Brand on why Nancy Astor so captivated the British elites:

It was … her frankness and friendliness, her ability to connect immediately, that was so utterly foreign, a direct import from the South, and which broke all known rules of engagement.

She made fun of the English class system even as she reveled in sitting atop it.

The Astors were “wet” Tories of the do-gooding, socially reforming sort. Waldorf Astor, with his wife’s help, won a seat in parliament representing a working-class area, the Sutton division of Plymouth. But when he inherited a title of nobility in 1919, he could no longer serve in the House of Commons. Fox does not explain by what morganatic arrangement it was permissible for Nancy Astor, now Lady Astor, to stand for his seat, but stand she did. And she hit it off with the poor and laboring men and women of Plymouth, who loved her forthrightness and wit.

When she entered the House of Commons in 1919 she was greeted coldly, but her feisty humor—and, one imagines, her noble title—enabled her to give as good as she got. Suffrage for women over age thirty had only just been enacted in Britain the previous year. As was true in America, one effect of letting women into politics was that it became, if not more moral, then surely more moralistic. Lady Astor was a rambunctious Virginian, but there was a prim side to her personality expressed in, among other things, her aversion to drink. She and her husband were teetotalers, highly unusual for their social set. Her embrace of the then-new doctrine of Christian Science bolstered this ascetic streak. Like some avenging WCTU-er she used her parliamentary megaphone to proselytize Britons on behalf of—of all things--restricting their access to spirits. Her one legislative distinction, according to Fox, was in putting through a bill to raise Britain’s pub drinking age to eighteen.

Her fellow Tory MPs lustily opposed such measures. Winston Churchill, for one, always found them to be “entirely uncalled-for and contrary to the best traditions of British freedom.” Harrumph. Churchill and Lady Astor disagreed about a lot of things, most notably how to respond to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Lady Astor was utterly misguided on this question. Bob Brand was the one member of her circle who, because he travelled to Germany on matters of state, saw the Nazi threat clearly and opposed it. That, at least, is what his grandson says. In fact, Fox does make a convincing case for Brand’s rectitude on the issue, and, moreover, for discarding the notion that the “Cliveden Set,” as it came notoriously to be called, were a cabal of latent fascists directing British policy toward appeasement.

The book offers an engrossing account of the propaganda efforts of the Stalinist journalist Claud Cockburn to tar wealthy capitalists and blue bloods as Hitler-lovers. Cockburn authored the “Cliveden Set” epithet and spread it around with the help, ironically enough, of Foreign Office anti-appeasers fighting to gain a hearing with the appeasement-minded Tory prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. Nancy Astor and the influential policymaker Lord Philip Lothian, her political (and Christian Science) soul mate, were for appeasement all the way. As Fox shows, this no more meant they were fascists than it meant Chamberlain was one. Chamberlain reflected the longstanding opinion of most of the British public; no cabal was needed to put over his foolish policy of seeking “peace in our time” by handing territory to the insatiable Third Reich.

Lothian redeemed himself later by admitting his purblindness and, as ambassador to the United States, helping to persuade President Roosevelt and the American congress to support Britain’s war effort with Lend Lease. It is not clear that Lady Astor ever recovered the esteem of the British (or American) public for so stubbornly resisting military and moral realities. Plymouth, though, was a different story; there her popularity never suffered. During the war she became a heroine. The Nazis rained bombs on Plymouth, and after the air raids she would walk the constituency, climb up on piles of rubble, and enjoin the townspeople not to give in to their fright or despair. She was tireless in relief work. When the attacks were at their worst she performed cartwheels, at the age of sixty-two, down in the bomb shelters to create a diversion.

She got the chance to enact the romantic notion she had long had of herself, in Plymouth, “as the Pilgrim returning to the place from which Drake had set off to reach Virginia.”

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