BOOK REVIEW: ‘Those Wild Wyndhams’ by Claudia Renton

OPINION:

THOSE WILD WYNDHAMS: THREE SISTERS AT THE HEART OF POWER

By Claudia Renton

Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 480 pages

When Mary Constance Wyndham was born in London in 1862, Britain was the height of the power generated by the world’s first industrial revolution and its largest, most widespread empire.

The daughter of Percy Wyndham, the wealthy son of the Earl of Leconfield, she would eventually marry Hugo, Lord Elcho and heir to the earldoms of Wemyss and March. Throughout her life she lived in luxurious houses in London and the country. Staffed by brigades of servants, they were visited by not only by aristocratic family and friends, but also by politicians, writers and painters.

John Singer Sargent captured her lavish surroundings — and also their fantastical side — in his 1899 painting “The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant.” The three sisters froth in white tulles and laces. Mary sits on the back of a sofa gazing at her pensive look-alike sister Madeleine, while pretty Pamela looks out of the frame, seemingly more engaged with the world than either of the others. It’s a gorgeous painting. When it was displayed at the Royal Academy, the Times’ critic said it was “the greatest picture that has appeared for many years,” and King Edward VII called its subjects “the three graces.”

It now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Reproduced on the cover of Claudia Renton’s “Those Wild Wyndhams,” it reminds us of a world where marriages were not formally contracted by the couple’s parents, but families made sure that both bride and groom had wealth and pedigree. When babies came, it was best that the first one or two were boys who could inherit the titles and houses.

Percy Wyndham was considered patient not to be cross that his first child was a girl, and when Mary’s brother George arrived, it was thought Percy had his just reward. Boys like George were educated at boarding schools and then at Oxford or Cambridge, but girls like Mary stayed home in the care of governesses. Their career was marriage and children — Mary had seven — while their brothers went into the diplomatic service or the army or politics.

This world is familiar to fans of “Downton Abbey” or “Upstairs, Downstairs.” What is so attractive about it? Why did “Downton” become so popular everywhere it was shown? Since few of us live in such places, one answer has to be that our pleasure is voyeuristic: We want to see how these people lived. Another answer is that we are sentimental: We enter into the imagined emotions of privileged people; when they may make mistakes we find them forgivable, even admirable, precisely because they are privileged.

The subtitle of Ms. Renton’s book, “Three Sisters at the Heart of Power,” entices but in fact Mary, Madeleine and Pamela lived on the edges of the power that was controlled by the men in their lives. Madeleine and Pamela lived most of their lives on country estates, though Mary was the close friend and eventually lover of Arthur Balfour, who became prime minister in 1902. Did he consider Mary’s opinions? Possibly. They were both Souls — a group of aristocratic men and women who kicked (gently) at the traces by being fashionably unconventional, discursive and amusing.

Mary told Balfour, “You were the only man I wanted for my husband,” noting later that he was “afraid, afraid, afraid!” Perhaps. He was also the man who most famously said, “Nothing matters much and few things matter at all,” and it is not clear that Mary had any serious influence on his political life.

Indeed, though the author’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, she does not make the case that Mary and her sisters mattered much to those in power. Nor does it seem that the three sisters were particularly wild. Her book is at its best in setting their lives — and by extension those of their class — against the political issues of the time, most time-consumingly, the question of Irish home rule.

Though Mary lived until 1937 and Madeleine until 1941, the last couple of decades of their lives are discussed in much less detail. Two of Mary’s sons and one of Pamela’s died in the trenches of World War I. Both mothers presented the deaths as those of champions of their country.

In 1920 Pamela married Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the former foreign secretary who had declared on the precipice of war that “The lamps were going out all over Europe.” His use of the passive voice suggests that he and those like him who really were at the heart of power never thought about who or what had precipitated the calamity, and whether their policies or actions had anything to do with it.

“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.

• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.