Pride and Pleasure

The saga of the gifted Schuyler sisters, embroiled in turmoil, triumph, and tragedy at the very heart of our country's founding.

In a letter to her sister, Eliza Hamilton, at a time when their family was embroiled in scandals both personal and political, Angelica Schulyer wrote that her sister may have spared herself all this pain had she married into another family "less near the sun." "But then," she continues, Eliza "would have missed the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions."

In Pride and Pleasure, Amanda Vaill draws on deep archival research and never published letters to uncover the stories of these two remarkable women, following both from their childhoods as colonial aristocrats through their marriages to unconventional men and divergent paths in adulthood-Eliza's first as helpmeet to the prodigious Alexander Hamilton and then as a philanthropist and political lobbyist, and Angelica's as a socialite and confidante of powerful men such as Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and, scandalously, her own sister's husband. Together, the twin stories of the Schuyler sisters create a captivating narrative of love, loyalty, and conviction. The women Vaill takes as her subjects in Pride and Pleasure were in their own ways as formidable as, and in some respects stronger than, the men they loved, married, and mothered. They may have signed no declarations, negotiated no treaties, enacted no laws, but their stories are embedded in the very pattern of American history, the warp on which it is woven.