Image: William Guy Wall / Metropolitan Museum

Learn more about Pride and Pleasure: the Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
  • October 2025
  • Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  • Hardcover, Audio & Digital
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Photo: Xanthe Elbrick Photography Amanda Vaill is the author of 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. More...

“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

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. More…

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

More…

Photo: Xanthe Elbrick Photography Amanda Vaill is the author of 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. More...