Waldorf’s Birthday Present
Gabriele Annan
- The Langhorne Sisters by James Fox
Granta, 612 pp, £20.00, November 1998, ISBN 1 86207 071 7
By the time she got married in 1895, Irene Langhorne was 22 and had had 62 proposals. Getting proposals was what Southern belles were brought up to do. Irene was the second of the five Langhorne sisters of Richmond, Virginia. She married Dana Gibson, the inventor of the Gibson girl. Famous for her beauty from coast to coast, she never got divorced and never gave any trouble, so she doesn’t come into James Fox’s story much; and neither does the eldest Langhorne sister Lizzie. Lizzie just got on the others’ nerves and was poor. There were also three brothers, but they don’t come into the story at all. They drank a lot, as did many Southern gentlemen after the Civil War.
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