Embers of Childhood: Growing Up a Whitney (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781948924009)

A Look into the Privileged World of the American Aristocracy of the Early Twentieth Century

Flora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world.
But money itself is not the source of happiness. Glimpses into the elegance of a Vanderbilt ball thrown by her great-grandparents and the yearly production of traveling from her childhood home on Long Island to their summer home in Aiken, South Carolina, are measured against memoires of strict governesses with stricter rules in a childhood separate from her parents, despite being in the same house, and the ever-present pressure to measure up in her studies and lessons. As Flora steps back in time to trace the origins of her family's fortune and where it stands today, she takes a discerning look at how wealth and excess shaped her life, for better and for worse.

In this wonderfully evocative memoir, Flora Miller Biddle examines, critiques, and pays homage to the people and places of her childhood that shaped her life.

Author: Flora Miller Biddle
ISBN-10: 1948924005
ISBN-13: 9781948924009
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Language: English
Published: 06/04/2019
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.30w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/01/2019
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2019
Library Journal 06/01/2019 pg. 125