Those wild Wyndhams - Claudia Renton

Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2014

A rich historical biography of 'those wild Wyndhams' - three cultured aristocratic sisters born into great privilege in late Victorian Britain.

Mary, Madeline and Pamela - the three beautiful Wyndham sisters - were born into immense wealth. Cultured bohemian daughters of a maverick politician and an artistic mother, they became entangled with the scandalous and intellectual 'Souls' set, as well as the most celebrated figures of the day, including Oscar Wilde, Marie Stopes and the iconoclastic poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, lover both of Mary and her mother before her. Two sisters were intimate with great statesmen - Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and the Liberal politician Edward Grey - and only one of them would marry happily.

This first ever biography of the sisters captures their dramatic lives from romantic beginnings through the passions and disappointments of womanhood to the tragedy and devastation of the First World War that brought a definitive end to their sons, their era and way of life.