Langhorne Sisters Views

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In 1895, he married Irene Langhorne, born in Danville, Virginia, a sister of Nancy Astor, the first woman to serve in as a Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons.[2] The elegant Langhorne sisters, born to a once-wealthy Virginia family devastated by the Civil War, served as the inspiration for the famous Gibson Girls.[3][4]

Nancy Langhorne had four sisters and three brothers. All the sisters were known for their beauty; her sister Irene later married the artist Charles Dana Gibson and became a model for the Gibson girl. Nancy and Irene both went to a finishing school in New York City. In New York, Nancy met her first husband, Robert Gould Shaw II, a cousin of the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. They were married in New York City on October 27, 1897, when she was 18.

Nancy Langhorne was destined to become the wife of one of the richest men in the world, chatelaine of Cliveden and Hever and the first woman to take her rightful place in the British House of Commons, but she never lost her fondness for the state where she was born. 'Nothing could be quite as lovely as that,'she wrote and, in later life, all the sisters came to regard Mirador 'with a symbolic importance beyond its natural beauty'. After all, had it not invented the Langhorne sisters?

'High-spirited, beautiful, clannish and adored' the Langhorne sisters were, to be sure, but their lives, lived at the very epicentre of the bon ton, were run through with tragedy. 'The most loved member of the entire family, without any doubt', was Nora, the youngest and one day to become the mother of Joyce Grenfell. She was 'extravagant, feckless and promiscuous' but she had 'an innate honesty,' her daughter would later write of her - an honesty that she refused to use until late in life when it had turned into remorse. Winkie Brooks, Phyllis's second son with her first husband became an alcoholic and threw himself from the window of a New York hotel. His elder brother, Peter, also committed suicide and the love of Phyllis's life - Captain Henry Douglas Pennant - was killed in the Great War. Nancy never forgot Phyllis's terrible scream when they brought her the news.