Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes

Description

Once upon a time the well-bred daughters of Britain's aristocracy took part in a female rite of passage: curtseying to the Queen. But in 1958 this ritual was coming to an end. Under pressure to shine - not least from their mothers - the girls became the focus for newspaper diarists and society photographers in a party season that stretched for months among the great houses of England, Ireland and Scotland. Fiona MacCarthy traces the stories of the girls who curtseyed that year, and shows how their lives were to open out in often very unexpected ways - as Britain itself changed irreversibly during the 1960s, and the certainties of the old order came to an end.

With her widely acclaimed book Eric Gill, published in 1989, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain. This was followed by William Morris (1994), which won several literary awards including the Wolfson History Prize and was described by A.S. Byatt as 'one of the finest biographies ever published in this country.' Byron: Life and Legend (2002), was described as 'one of the great literary biographies of our time', by The Independent on Sunday. Fiona MacCarthy writes regularly for the Guardian and lives in Derbyshire.