Feels like watching the unfolding of a horror film, albeit a very pretty one ... Proves immensely rewarding ... Ostler transforms history’s grand sweep into intimate profile. She has compiled a mountain of research among archives and interviews. You get the sense Ostler could walk into a party between the years 1871 and 1939 and tell you not only who’s who, but who’s sleeping with whom.
In this thrilling book Catherine Ostler follows the story of the three Cahen d’Anvers sisters as they twinkle and twirl in belle époque Paris ... Paints a glittering picture of cake shops and cotillions, trips to the dressmaker and dancing till dawn, yachting on the Côte d’Azur and attending the races in Deauville ... Much more than an engrossing family saga about lucky people brought low ... Essential reading for our times, a terrible warning about how racial hatred can lie dormant for decades before reappearing with a vengeance in times of political and financial chill.
A narrative that moves between intimacy and the wider sweep of history ... What gives the book its particular resonance is the tension between what is seen and what is hidden ... In the end, The Renoir Girls is less about a painting than about what lies beyond its frame: the passage of time, the shifting of identities, the sudden and often catastrophic turns of history. It is a reminder that even the most serene images can contain within them the seeds of their own undoing.
A fascinating book ... Relying on gossip, supposition, contemporary writing, and family memories — plus a deep dive into French and English archives — Ostler pieces together what happened to the two girls in the decades after the portrait was completed. A final, thunder-clap revelation is the capstone of her absorbing account.
On the one hand, The Renoir Girls is a story of the 0.01 percent, the upper crust (gratin). And on the other, it is a story of a Jewish family navigating timeless questions of love, war, marriage, and divorce, as well as pressures of modernity, including dilemmas about conversion and safety ... Ostler vividly describes the salons and parties at the Cahen d’Anver mansion in Paris ... Avoids the mythic ... Ostler provides a heavily detailed history of these critical junctures in modern French and Jewish life through the story of this once-renowned family and their lesser-known stories ... This is a modern biography that tends toward comprehensive over representative.
This underwhelming history from former Tatler editor-in-chief Ostler (The Duchess Countess) spotlights the opulence, scandal, and tragedy of the Cahen d’Anvers family ... There are other delightful details buried within ... But this stultifies more often than it entertains.
