Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution

"Yes. I got to listen to that soundtrack obsessively when my children were young. But whenever you encounter the story of Alexander Hamilton, you’re like: What about the women who are just a side note? Amanda Vaill does an incredible job. Talk about a biography that’s going against the grain. First of all, how in-depth her research was. To have a biography of this size about women from that time is amazing. That’s hard to get. She disrupts the narrative a little bit—there are some pieces written in different tenses which really focuses the reader in a way they wouldn’t normally be focused. While the sisters’ lives are told in the present tense, the broader historical events are in the past. And the detail! We have what exactly they were wearing, exactly how long it would take to get from Albany to New York in that time… It isn’t just focused on the big star events of their lives, but also the minutiae of their daily lives. She’s an incredible biographer who has been writing this for years, and it really shows her range. You’re right, there are more group biographies being written. I’m writing one right now. You have to do all the research on multiple people, but you can’t get as much depth. That’s the downside. It makes you less obsessive about a single character. When looking at this time period, I think it is really beneficial to see a group biography. There are phases in the genre, and right now we are seeing few biographies about a single white male character put on a pedestal, because our understanding of history is moving away from that. The idea that history was just done by George Washington or Alexander Hamilton is not accepted any more. And that opens it up to these larger scopes of understanding history and understanding literature. You know? Because it’s not always a single author who has written those books, it’s maybe a partnership with a wife. That’s finally coming to life and it’s beautiful to see."