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Amanda Vaill on the Schuyler Sisters, with Megan Marshall
This event is FREE and open to the public. Registration is required.
Please join us for this discussion on the historic Schuyler Sisters with the author Megan Marshall.
Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, born to wealth and privilege in New York’s Hudson Valley during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were raised to make good marriages and supervise substantial households. Instead they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain―and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.
Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment through attachments to powerful men, eloped at twenty with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, first in Paris, then in London, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, one year her junior, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless illegitimate outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career. But after his appointment as America’s first Treasury Secretary, she was challenged by the controversies in which he became involved, not the least of which was the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.
When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one deprived of her animating spirit, the other improbably gaining a new, self-determined life. “You would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun,” wrote Angelica to Eliza, “but then [you would have missed] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.”
Amanda Vaill is the author of Pride and Pleasure, Hotel Florida, Somewhere, and the bestselling Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, and her journalism and criticism have appeared The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Town & Country, and New York. A past fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.
Megan Marshall is the author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, a collection of retrospective essays on the biographer’s craft, and three biographies: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor Emerita at Emerson College, where she taught life writing and archival research in the MFA Creative Writing program.
This event is FREE and open to the public. Registration is required.
Please join us for this discussion on the historic Schuyler Sisters with the author Megan Marshall.
Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, born to wealth and privilege in New York’s Hudson Valley during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were raised to make good marriages and supervise substantial households. Instead they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain―and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.
Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment through attachments to powerful men, eloped at twenty with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, first in Paris, then in London, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, one year her junior, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless illegitimate outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career. But after his appointment as America’s first Treasury Secretary, she was challenged by the controversies in which he became involved, not the least of which was the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.
When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one deprived of her animating spirit, the other improbably gaining a new, self-determined life. “You would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun,” wrote Angelica to Eliza, “but then [you would have missed] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.”
Amanda Vaill is the author of Pride and Pleasure, Hotel Florida, Somewhere, and the bestselling Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, and her journalism and criticism have appeared The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Town & Country, and New York. A past fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.
Megan Marshall is the author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, a collection of retrospective essays on the biographer’s craft, and three biographies: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor Emerita at Emerson College, where she taught life writing and archival research in the MFA Creative Writing program.