Amanda Vaill Officially

News updates and media appearances.

• Nov 24, 2025: “Author dissects Schuyler sisters’ relationships in ‘Pride and Pleasure’” in the Albany Times Union

  “Amanda Vaill’s obsession with the Schuyler sisters paid off. After spending eight years reading their correspondences, combing through archival records and receipts, and examining objects, ‘Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution’ tells the Alexander Hamilton story from a female vantage point.”

  Read the full article online
• Nov 21, 2025: “‘Pride and Pleasure’ Review: The Schuyler Sister Act” in The Wall Street Journal

  “Elegantly written, intimately detailed and infused with feeling, the book is a gripping account of these two remarkable women, their elite family and their tumultuous era.”

  Read the full article online
• Nov 17, 2025: “For the Ages: A History Podcast” interview

  Amanda was interviewed by David M. Rubenstein, discussing Pride and Pleasure.

• Nov 14, 2025: “Five Best: Stories of Sisters,” The Wall Street Journal

  Amanda recommends five of her favorites, from Jane Austen to Tennessee Williams.

  Read the full article online
• Oct 23, 2025: “9 Books We Love This Week,” New York Times

  The award-winning Vaill, who’s previously turned her biographer’s lens on Gerald and Sara Murphy and Jerome Robbins, dials back the clock to the colonial-era New York of the five wealthy Schuyler sisters. “Hamilton” may have brought attention to the elder sisters’ romantic rivalry, but theirs was also a much longer story of philanthropy, political engagement and a young country shifting beneath their feet.

  Read the full article online
• Oct 22, 2025: “Before ‘Hamilton,’ the Schuyler Sisters Were Already Stars,” New York Times Book Review (front page review)

  “In ‘Pride and Pleasure,’ the biographer Amanda Vaill tells the story of these complex women with warmth, humor and insight.”

  Anyone writing a biography of the Schuyler sisters, as Amanda Vaill does in “Pride and Pleasure,” has set themselves a challenging task. Not only do they have to compete with a host of Revolutionary War biographers, but, more notably, with “Hamilton,” the most popular musical of the 21st century. A great number of fans will have a preconceived notion of the most famous Schuyler sisters — Angelica, Eliza and Peggy. Woe betide the biographer who depicts them in a way that does not correspond with their vision.

  And it is indeed possible that fans of that particularly Obama-era, multicultural, musical delight might take occasional issue with some historical realities. They may be disappointed to know, for instance, that the Schuyler sisters’ idyllic childhood in Albany, raised by doting parents and educated in a library stuffed with volumes of Shakespeare, was periodically interrupted by their enslaved servants running away after suffering severe frostbite.

  Those undeterred by these unfortunate facts, however, will appreciate a thoroughly fascinating biography, filled with Vaill’s signature warmth, humor and insight. The author, who has previously written about Gerald and Sarah Murphy and Jerome Robbins, has a definite way with words; the Marquis de Lafayette is, for instance, a man “who thinks in run-on sentences.”

  Read the full article online
• Oct 21, 2025: Elizabeth Stone discusses Pride and Pleasure with Amanda Vaill for Slate

  “The Sisters in the Love Triangle Hamilton Teased Get Their Own Biography: How Amanda Vaill gave Eliza and Angelica Schuyler their due.”

  Vaill’s own literal hands-on encounter with Eliza’s books is one of many illustrations she offers about history’s influence on the individual and the individual’s influence on history. But some history that happens is like those unheard trees falling in the forest. Vaill, like some historians, believes that the story told of the American Revolution remains one that has been told by and about me—those who take pens to parchment, as well as those who take muskets to battlefields. Vaill could have made Pride and Pleasure a briefer book if she had chosen to constrict the male narrative and focus on the sisters alone. But in joining it with her own now-recovered narrative, she is restoring sound to the fallen forest trees, and possibly presenting a new conception. Determined not to quarantine either story, she prefers what she calls the egalitarian “jump cut,” to the subordinating “meanwhile.”

  Vaill never writes her books in a style she would call her own. She cultivates at least a single voice, stylistically appropriate, for each of her books. In Pride and Pleasure, Vaill uses two voices, applying tone aesthetically and instructively, almost as Miranda does. For the historical narrative that we already know, she includes dated words like tonnish and branglers, as well as dated metaphors, characterizing conversations among diplomats as “decorous minuets,” and sprinkling in references to 18th-century authors like Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne.”

  Read the full article online
• Oct 15, 2025: “You know all their songs from ‘Hamilton,’ but now it’s time to meet the real Schuyler sisters,” The Boston Globe

  A dual review of Pride and Pleasure and Molly Beer’s book, Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution.

  “Vaill’s book is wider in scope, cogently sketching the lives of younger sisters Peggy, Cornelia, and Kitty while focusing on Angelica and Eliza, she and Beer follow the same cast of characters through the Revolution and the early years of the Republic… Vaill’s elegantly detailed text provides a clearer narrative than Beer’s elliptical prose, but both excel in vivid scene-setting… An experienced biographer and historian with three previous books to her credit, Vaill flags her well-informed speculations throughout ‘Pride and Pleasure’ by posing them as questions.

  Read the full article online
• Oct 10, 2025: Jane Kamensky, “The Many Lives of Eliza Schuyler,” The Atlantic, November 2025 issue and online

  “At least since 1800, when Parson Weems published his Life of Washington, biography has been the medium through which most Americans have understood the birth of their country. That is not a bad thing: The genre admits nuance, with every human life as patterned yet unique as a fingerprint. And it insists that everyone, past and present, lives in both epochal and personal time, making and made by history.

  “So, too, Amanda Vaill’s Schuyler sisters. Staking a claim not just to the significance of her protagonists but also to her own stature as a portraitist in the grand manner, Vaill builds on some of the most compelling writing about women in early America, which has peered into the households of famous men, drawing on ample records to cast light in otherwise shadowy corners.”

  Read the full article online
• Sep 29, 2025: Pride and Pleasure is a New York Times October Book Recommendation

  “The award-winning Vaill, who’s previously turned her biographer’s lens on Gerald and Sara Murphy and Jerome Robbins, dials back the clock to the colonial-era New York of the five wealthy Schuyler sisters. ‘Hamilton’ may have brought attention to the elder sisters’ romantic rivalry, but theirs was also a much longer story of philanthropy, political engagement and a young country shifting beneath their feet.”