“An epic biography of America’s Revolutionary Age—truly a Tolstoyan accomplishment, a sweeping narrative filled with love affairs, political intrigue and battlefield drama. [Pride and Pleasure] is a piece of revelatory biography at its best, deeply researched and wonderfully told.” Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography
Pride and Pleasure
The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
- A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
- A Town & Country Must-Read Book for Fall 2025
If it hadn’t been for the Revolutionary War, things might have been very different for the two women Alexander Hamilton came to describe as his “dear brunettes.”
Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, daughters of colonial Hudson Valley aristocracy, would have followed their family’s expectations, making dynastic marriages and supervising substantial households — but they didn’t. Instead, they became embroiled in the turmoil of America’s insurrection against Great Britain, and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each sister was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.
Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment through attachments to powerful men, eloped at twenty with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life on two continents, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married Hamilton, a penniless, illegitimate outsider, and devoted herself to his career. After his appointment as America’s first treasury secretary, Eliza was challenged by the public and private controversies that plagued her husband, not the least of which was the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.
When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one was deprived of her animating spirit, while the other improbably gained a new, self-determined life. “You would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun,” wrote Angelica to Eliza. “But then [you would have missed] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.”
Drawing on deep archival research, including never-published records and letters, Amanda Vaill interweaves this family drama with its historical context, creating a narrative with the sweep and intimacy of a nineteenth-century novel. Full of battles and dinner parties, murky politics and transparent frocks, fierce loyalties and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life. ▣
Pride and Pleasure includes sixteen pages of illustrations.
Audio
Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook edition, available now from Macmillan Audio.
Video
With Bill Goldstein, “Conversations from the Cullman Center,” Oct 22, 2025
Praise for Pride and Pleasure
“One of our great biographers takes the sisters out of Hamilton’s supporting cast and puts them front and center.” Town & Country
“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, …Her book is an act not only of recovery, but of world building, restoring the connections between home and history that made the American Revolution. Vaill’s historical and literary achievement is to convey what it felt like to be a woman who, as she writes of Angelica, longed ‘to put her fingertips to history,’ even if she touched it only softly.” Jane Kamensky, The Atlantic
“A thoroughly fascinating biography, filled with Vaill’s signature warmth, humor and insight…. it’s a testament to the force of the Schuyler sisters’ personalities that they dwarf both the Revolutionary War and the political disputes that followed.” Jennifer Wright, New York Times Book Review (Front page review)
“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.” The Wall Street Journal
“A cause for celebration… Vaill’s elegantly detailed text…excels in vivid scene-setting.” Wendy Smith, Boston Globe
“Amanda Vaill achieves what is for biographers a difficult balance between biography and history. I just wanted to stand up and cheer.” Carl Rollyson, New York Sun
“A brilliant biography…Amanda Vaill is just a wonderful, wonderful writer who brings the past to immediate life.” Bill Goldstein, NBC
“Some history that happens is like those unheard trees falling in the forest….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.” Elizabeth Stone, Slate
“[A] luxuriant dual biography… Vaill’s richly textured portrait [is] an elegant and entertaining account of the surprisingly modern lives of founding women.” Publishers Weekly
“The Schuylers have their ideal biographer in Amanda Vaill, who reveals the revolutionary strength of women adroitly using their influence to shape and preserve the very history that later excluded them. This rich, meticulously researched, beautifully written book tells the full story behind the fascinating women in ‘Hamilton’ and brings them back to life with the fiery drama and brilliant insight they deserve.” Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
“In a triumph of vivid storytelling built on excavation of myriad never seen sources, Amanda Vaill resurrects and restores two women at the center of our democracy’s founding. Pride and Pleasure, is edge-of-your-seat novelistic… As I read the final pages, I was as rejuvenated by the original dreams for our country as I was moved by Eliza Hamilton in her 90s, walking the streets of the new capital, in view of the monument to her old friend George Washington under construction.” Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury
“Amanda Vaill has given the Schuyler sisters their long-overdue retrieval from the footnote pages of Alexander Hamilton’s story. Here, they are formidable women navigating love, loss, power, and purpose in revolutionary America, not simply witnesses to history, but the makers and shapers of it, too. This is biography as it should be — unsparing, elegant, and utterly enthralling.” Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire
“In a tremendous feat of induction, Pride and Pleasure tells most of the history of the Revolution and early republic through the lives of Eliza Hamilton and Angelica Church, and depicts a vast range of consequential conduct, private and public. Written with grace and authority, it always puts the reader right ‘in the room where it happens.’” Thomas Mallon, author of Henry and Clara and The Very Heart of It
“Pride and Pleasure is a marvel. With style and ingenuity, Amanda Vaill has transmuted a prodigious amount of archival research into a brisk narrative that is both erudite and entertaining… The Schuyler sisters come alive in these pages, and they are delightful, instructive, dazzling company.” Victoria Johnson, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist for American Eden