A circle of sisters : Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin

The Macdonald sisters -Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Luisa- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet of Empire, Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Primer Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the nineteenth century.