Embers of Childhood

Growing Up a Whitney

De: Flora Miller Biddle

Narrado por: Rosemary Benson

A look into the privileged world of the American aristocracy of the early 20th century.

Flora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world.

But money itself is not the source of happiness. Glimpses into the elegance of a Vanderbilt ball thrown by her great-grandparents and the yearly production of traveling from her childhood home on Long Island to their summer home in Aiken, South Carolina, are measured against memoires of strict governesses with stricter rules in a childhood separate from her parents, despite being in the same house, and the ever-present pressure to measure up in her studies and lessons. As Flora steps back in time to trace the origins of her family's fortune and where it stands today, she takes a discerning look at how wealth and excess shaped her life, for better and for worse.

In this wonderfully evocative memoir, Flora Miller Biddle examines, critiques, and pays homage to the people and places of her childhood that shaped her life.

©2011 Flora Miller Biddle (P)2021 Tantor

A Glimpse into a Privileged Upbringing

This book was an interesting and well written account of the author's growing up years. Flora (whose grandmother was a Vanderbilt) grew up in the 1930's and 1940's and writes candidly of the loneliness experienced by a child raised largely by staff and of the high expectations that were put upon children in America's upper class.

Very interesting historical content

I love the Gilded Age years because it defines how New York City came to be. This story provided an area of history that lies in the shadow of its margins, yet is a significant part of its very roots.