Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
by Amanda Vaill
Summary
A double biography of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, the two daughters of Philip Schuyler's Hudson Valley dynasty who mattered most to Alexander Hamilton. Vaill's argument is that the Revolutionary War broke the path laid out for them, dynastic marriage and the running of a large household, and that each sister rebelled against it in her own way. Angelica eloped in 1777 with John Barker Church, a British merchant and war profiteer her father disapproved of, and spent sixteen years abroad, charming Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in Paris and moving among the Prince of Wales's set in London. Eliza, blunt and uninterested in intrigue, married a penniless outsider in 1780 and gave herself to his career, then had to live through the public scandals that followed his appointment as the first treasury secretary, including the Reynolds affair and the attraction that grew between her husband and her sister.
Vaill traces that flirtation carefully. She argues that Angelica first met Hamilton at Eliza's wedding, not before, and she suggests the relationship may have become physical while insisting that his loyalty stayed with Eliza; Publishers Weekly thought the romance theory overstated given how openly Eliza joined in the teasing. The book's last hundred pages and more belong to Eliza's fifty years of widowhood after the 1804 duel: paying down Hamilton's debts, founding an orphan asylum in New York in 1806, and organizing his papers so that his writings could be published. Kirkus found her the blunter of the two and the one with more integrity, tough and resourceful in widowhood.
Vaill, who wrote Everybody Was So Young and a life of Jerome Robbins, builds the book from letters and archives and writes it like a long nineteenth century novel, with battles and dinner parties, transparent frocks and the finances of John Church's ventures given equal attention. It is long, gossipy in the best sense, and easy to read. It suits anyone who came to the founding era through Hamilton and wants the women put at the center, and readers of Ron Chernow who would like the same story told from the other side of the dinner table.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Pride and Pleasure the 2026 Prize for Biography on May 4, 2026, with James McWilliams's The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford and Lance Richardson's True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen as finalists. Farrar, Straus and Giroux had published it in October 2025. Before the Pulitzer it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and it was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
Vaill was executive editor at Viking Penguin before leaving publishing to write full time. Everybody Was So Young (1998), her life of Gerald and Sara Murphy, was a National Book Critics Circle finalist, Somewhere (2006) was a biography of Jerome Robbins that grew into a PBS documentary, and Hotel Florida (2014) followed the correspondents of the Spanish Civil War. The book's timing owes something to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical, which made Angelica and Eliza famous to a generation that had never read about them, and Vaill's account puts the documentary record beside the stage version.