The Revolutionary Lives of the Schuyler Sisters
The Revolutionary War changed everything for the two women Alexander Hamilton came to describe as his “dear brunettes.”
In other times 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 as they became embroiled in the turmoil of America’s insurrection against Great Britain, they rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each sister was from the other.
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 all the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister. When tragedy followed, one sister was deprived of her animating spirit, while the other improbably gained a new, self-determined life that was truly revolutionary. “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 dismantles the false binary of private experience and public events to create a history of the founding era that is also 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.
About the Author
Amanda Vaill
Amanda Vaill’s most recent book is Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She has written three previous biographies — Hotel Florida, Somewhere, and the best-selling Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award — and has co-authored, contributed to, or edited a number of other books in the field of arts and culture.
She is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter and her journalism and criticism have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Town and Country, and New York.
Amanda grew up in New York City and graduated from Radcliffe College with a degree in English Literature. A former book editor, nonprofit executive, and past fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she lives in Manhattan with her husband and two cats.