Books by Jean Strouse

Family Romance by Jean Strouse book cover image

Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers

The Bancroft Prize winning author captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent’s portraits of the Wertheimer family.

Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career – and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

In commissioning this grand series of paintings, Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent, became Sargent’s greatest private patron and close friend. The Wertheimers worked with Rothschilds and royals, plutocrats and dukes – as did Sargent. Asher left most of his Sargent portraits to London’s National Gallery, a gift that elicited censure as well as praise: it was a new thing for a family of Jews to appear alongside the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats and dignitaries painted by earlier masters.

Strouse’s account, set primarily in England around the turn of the twentieth century, takes in the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy and the dramatic rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. It travels back through hundreds of years to the Habsburg court in Vienna and forward to fascist Italy in the 1930s. Its depictions of Sargent, his sitters, their friendships and circles, and the portraits themselves, light up a period that saw tumultuous social change and the birth of the modern art market.

Sargent brilliantly portrayed these transformations, in which the Wertheimers were key players. Family Romance brings their interwoven stories fully to life for the first time.

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Praise for Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers

“I read and shivered and tried, unsuccessfully, to think of other sub-three-hundred-page works of nonfiction that deserve to be called epic”
Jackson Arn, The New Yorker

“a book as finely crafted as the portraits it describes”
Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal

“an absorbing, frequently tragic portrayal of [a] glittering, fragile epoch”
Charles Finch, The Boston Globe

“Family Romance shines when portraying the groundswells altering high society”
Walker Mimms, The New York Times

“Strouse’s feeling for these portraits is evident in her passionate descriptions of her encounters with them…. [a] beguiling and absorbing book”
Ruth Franklin, Harper’s

“Outstanding…[Family Romance] not only gives the Wertheimers their due, but helps to finish painting the picture of them that the master portraitist of their gilded age had left so tantalizingly incomplete”
Elroy Rosenberg, Tablet

“A riveting book about an amazing vanished world, a remarkable family and a great and mysterious artist, told with energy and vividness and sharp humour, full of extraordinary characters, some dubious, some shocking, some tragic, and sweeping with speed and brio over a great arc of time. No one could tell this story better, and what a story it is!”
Hermione Lee

“Family Romance belongs to that august line of panoramic social histories with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, and, as the chronicle of an aristocracy in decline, with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Jean Strouse is one of our subtlest biographers, and she shares John Singer Sargent’s eye for the exquisitely telling detail that illuminates not only a character but an age.”
Judith Thurman

“A society in transition, an elusive painter in his prime, and an Anglo-Jewish dynasty with aristocratic habits: All the elements are here for a rich drama. Jean Strouse delivers, prismatically pairing art and life, illuminating corners of brilliant privilege and dark prejudice, inviting us to peer, over John Singer Sargent’s shoulder, into Gilded Age drawing rooms. Stylish, sumptuous, and a joy to read.”
Stacy Schiff

Morgan, American Financier

This magisterial biography, based extensively on new material, draws a definitive, full-scale portrait of Morgan’s tumultuous life both in and out of the public eye. Award-winning biographer Jean Strouse vividly portrays the financial colossus, the avid collector of art, and the entirely human character behind all the myths. Brilliantly crafted, epic in scope, Morgan reveals a man we have never seen before, offering new insights on the culture, political struggles, and social conflicts of America’s Gilded Age.

New York Times best seller. Finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Short-listed among “Best Books of 1999” by The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Time, Business Week, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The New York Post.

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Praise for Morgan, American Financier

“In this engrossing story – an extraordinary accomplishment, filled with the vitality of the biographer and the fascination of her subject – Morgan has finally met his match.”
Michael Holroyd

“Magnificent…. Rich in detail, informed by a wealth of new sources, written in a clear style that wears well, it provides the fullest and most revealing look at this remarkable, complex man that we are likely to get.”
The Wall Street Journal

“The Morgan that Jean Strouse has brought to life in her masterful, long-awaited biography is deeply human, the most intricate and integrated portrait we have yet had…. Her storytelling [has] the richness and penetration of a novel.”
David Michaelis, New York Observer

“Strouse is in full command of Pierpont Morgan’s personal life, his financial operations, his collecting, and his benefactions, and presents a rich, vivid picture of the background against which they took place…. She has written a magnificent biography, which illuminates her subject and his world.”
Robert Skidelsky, The New York Review of Books

“No one else has told the tale of Pierpont Morgan in the detail, depth and understanding of Jean Strouse, who spent nearly a decade searching for the living truth behind the mythology of Morganalia…. [A] masterpiece.”
Robert Heilbroner, The Los Angeles Times

“This study is likely to be definitive for a hundred years.”
Baltimore Sun

“A thoroughly documented, conscientiously nonpartisan, and rounded life of the financial colossus… More completely than those who have labored over this gigantic figure before, Strouse exposes the whole man.”
Boston Globe

Alice James by Jean Strouse book cover image

Alice James, A Biography

*NEW EDITION coming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2024

Foreword by Colm Tóibín

Winner of the Bancroft Prize for Distinguished American History

Virginia Woolf wondered, in A Room of One’s Own, what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a wonderfully gifted sister. Henry and William James did have a gifted sister, through whom we can see an extraordinary family of American intellectuals, a story of ‘nervous’ troubles, medical history, women’s experience, and a singular individual finding a voice of her own.

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Praise for Alice James, A Biography

“A triumph of exact compassion, of disciplined speculation, and of imaginative justice.”
Christopher Ricks, Sunday Times (London)

“Strouse, in acquainting us with the younger sister of William and Henry James, has…written a Jamesian novel, subtle, evasive, embroidered, splendid.”
John Leonard, The New York Times

“…a portrait of the inner workings of the entire [James] family.”
Colm Tóibín, Introduction to Alice James

“Brilliant… Jean Strouse has created a fascinating picture of ‘woman’s place’ in a family of genius and throws a searching light on the price a woman sometimes pays when reared in such a hothouse.”
Leon Edel

“Judicious and beautifully written”
Diane Johnson, The New York Times Book Review