[Renton's written portrait] no less than Sargent’s, is a triumph of observation, insight and erudition ... An elegant, restrained writer, she rarely comments. Consequently, her subjects seem to reveal themselves. Renton’s descriptions are as evocative as they are informative... Through Renton’s flawless lens, the reader sees them, too.
Those Wild Wyndhams is a magnificent first book by the historian and barrister Claudia Renton ... [a description of the book] together with the unnecessarily florid gold writing on the cover, may imply an entertaining romp. In fact it's something far more profound. Renton's book has the wisdom, excitement and psychological depth of a very good novel. She succeeds in the difficult feat of combining the novelist's art with the historian's craft, laying her sources and workings before us ... The beauty and romance – sometimes joyful, more often wrenchingly sad – are captured unforgettably in Renton's wonderful book.
Through [Renton's] firm hands on the reins of her material ensure that readers are always entertained, and often also enlightened about late-19th-century British history... The Wild Wyndhams is never less than readable, but never convinces that its subjects are worth the attention given them in this well-researched and well-written collective biography.
What did it feel like to find yourself cornered in the inglenook at Clouds with a Wyndham sister bearing down on you for a confidential chat? It is these missing textures that many historians have tried to recover ... no one, including Claudia Renton in her accomplished first book, Those Wild Wyndhams, has quite succeeded ... Much of this material is familiar; nonetheless Renton works hard to shape it into interesting new configurations. Particularly fine is the way she draws on the remarkably frank letters among the Wyndham women to map out their bodily realities, particularly their experience of menstruation ... Where Renton is less adept is in integrating these fine-grained intimacies into the broader political story. Nonetheless, she is quite right to try ... Renton wants to make it clear that she is not simply writing an upmarket soap opera of the Downton Abbey kind. But it is very hard to keep these differently scaled narratives developing together, and the result is paragraphs that lurch from the latest on the brewing Boer War to someone’s first trimester, or from the first Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910 to the campaign for a Home Defense Army.
Much of the story Renton tells is familiar, but her focus on three sisters works well and the extensive research she has carried out in family archives has resulted in some nice details and lively anecdotes.... The writing, however, is frequently slack... and contains some alarming failures of tone.
Renton is an empowered 21st-century woman... Her formidable success gives a special, beguiling quality to her debut book, Those Wild Wyndhams ... Ms. Renton’s own capacities and possibilities make her empathetic, but never condescending, toward the Wyndhams, gilded captives of their time and class. She admires their fortitude rather than pities their tragedies... Above all, she celebrates sisterhood... Ms. Renton is an elegant, amusing writer, with the lithe diction of a lawyer who wins her cases. Just occasionally she crashes into cliché: Then the sparks fly, and there are spanners in the works. These tiny blotches never mar a humane and tender portrait of [the Wyndham family].
[A] thorough, if less than fully captivating, biography... Renton uses a light, almost gossipy tone... Renton attempts to flesh out the Wyndhams to explain both public fascination with them... but the famed Wyndham charisma doesn’t quite shine through. This tale of the witty, sparkling privileged set may appeal most to fans of Downton Abbey.
[An] accomplished literary debut, a spirited and captivating history of the lives and loves of aristocrats in Victorian/Edwardian Britain. Drawing on letters, memoirs, histories, and abundant archival sources, the author creates a richly detailed tapestry featuring the three alluring Wyndham sisters ... A sparkling family portrait and riveting history.
[Those Wild Wyndhams is an] elegantly written tableau of a book is much more than a group biography; it is an elegiac account of the horrors of the First World War from the female perspective.
Renton’s first book is impeccably rehearsed and researched. She is almost too obsessed by recounting the political goings-on of the age while skimming over the more riveting sexual preferences of a Prime Minister in an attempt to ensure the biography isn’t regarded as trivial. But the heartbreaking letters between the Wyndham sisters and their children during the war ensure this book was never going to be a raucous romp through the lives of the upper classes but a serious, spellbinding chronicle of the last days of the Edwardian England.
Those Wild Wyndhams is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched tale of family, friends, and history. It is an easy read, with humor, pathos, and the curious behaviors of its fully three-dimensional characters.
