★ "An engaging blend of perceptive biography and vivid narrative history." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Amanda Vaill has crafted an epic biography of America’s Revolutionary Age—truly a Tolstoyan accomplishment, a sweeping narrative filled with love affairs, political intrigue and battlefield drama. The vibrant Schuyler sisters were not only feminist witnesses, but astute actors in the American Revolution. Vaill’s work 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 in New York City

“Pride and Pleasure is a marvel. Amanda Vaill has transmuted a prodigious amount of archival research into a brisk narrative that is both erudite and entertaining. Telling the stories of 18th- and 19th-century women—even those who were married to famous men—poses special challenges for the biographer, and Vaill has faced these challenges with style and ingenuity. The Schuyler sisters come alive in these pages, and they are delightful, instructive, dazzling company.” —Victoria Johnson, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist for American Eden

“In a triumph of vivid storytelling built on excavation of myriad never seen sources, Amanda Vaill resurrects and restores two women at the center of our democracy’s founding. Pride and Pleasure, is edge-of-your-seat novelistic, the story of the extraordinary and intertwining lives of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton and Angelica Schuyler Church, until now known as the two brilliant sisters who both loved Alexander Hamilton. As I read the final pages, I was as rejuvenated by the original dreams for our country as I was moved by Eliza Hamilton in her nineties, walking the streets of the new capital, in view of the monument to her old friend George Washington under construction." —Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

“The Schuylers have their ideal biographer in Amanda Vaill, whose captivating, rich, novelistic story reveals the revolutionary strength of women adroitly using their influence to shape and preserve the very history that later excluded them. This meticulously researched, beautifully written book brings these amazing women back to life with the fiery drama and brilliant insight they deserve—the full story behind the fascinating women in Hamilton.” —Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford

“Amanda Vaill’s book is a tremendous feat of induction, managing as it does to tell most of the history of the Revolution and early republic through the lives of Eliza Hamilton and Elizabeth Church, two sisters within the endlessly fertile and politically busy Schuyler family of upstate New York. Written with grace and authority, Pride and Pleasure depicts a vast range of consequential conduct, private and public, and it always puts the reader right 'in the room where it happens.'” —Thomas Mallon, author of Fellow Travelers and Henry and Clara

“Amanda Vaill has given the Schuyler sisters their long-overdue retrieval from the footnote pages of Alexander Hamilton's story. Here, they are formidable women navigating love, loss, power, and purpose in revolutionary America, not simply witnesses to history, but the makers and shapers of it, too. This is biography as it should be—unsparing, elegant, and utterly enthralling.” —Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire