I didn't like this one nearly as much as i liked her next book courtesans which i read before i read this one. ( )

Although this book goes right up to the late 20th century, the author's father being a diplomat in Ireland at the time of the murder of the British Ambassador by the IRA, my favourite sections came earlier.

Ann Fanshaw, the wife of Charles II's ambassador to Spain, led a very exciting life including forging documents to get herself and her children out of England during the Commonwealth, and narrowly avoiding both shipwreck and an attack by Turkish pirates, while Lady Mary Wortley-Montague's descriptions of the formality of life at the Viennese and Turkishs courts in the early 18th century were fascinating (it's her picture on the book's front cover). I also enjoyed Miss Tully's description of all the precautions the consular staff and their families took, when they shut themselves up in the consulate during an outbreak of the plague in Tripoli in 1785. ( )

I really wanted to like this book, but it suffers from a great lack of structure. Keeping track of the women, where they resided(particularly when some of them served in mulitple locations) and in which era became a burden I could not maintain. It became increasingly difficult to determine whether comparisons were being made between two ladies who served in the same location at the same time versus two ladies who served at the same time at two different locations. Top that with comparisons between ladies of different times and different locations and you understand why a cheat sheet became necessary. Even the listing in the front of the book fell short of assistance because it was sorted by timeline, not alphabetically, so to use it as reference required searching the entire list for names.

With that said, there was some skilled writing on evidence here, and some of the details of diplomatic life provided were exceptionally interesting. I feel that maybe a better editor could have improved this from a mediocre book to a powerful read.

NOTE: I am writing this review as a US citizen - it's possible that a British subject, maybe more familiar with their own diplomatic missions and history would have less difficulty following this book. ( )

An absolute gem of a book, telling the true stories of the women who supported their husbands (or vice versa!) throughout the trials and tribulations of representing Britain abroad. Broad historical coverage from early 1600's to almost present day with some fascinating windows into worlds I never knew existed. Yes some of them were a snobby lot but what comes across most strongly is a genuine love of adventure.
The book does not attempt to be a scholarly tour-de-force - however it is thought-provoking if you care to think a little about what you are reading. Highly entertaining and very British! ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1127018.html

I'm probably being rather unfair to this book, but I'm giving up on it not quite half-way through. Hickman, herself a diplomat's daughter, has pulled together an engaging collection of correspondence from the wives (and occasionally other female relatives) of British diplomats posted abroad throughout the last four centuries. The material is amusing and sometimes moving. But I felt that the book lacked a substantial intellectual framework, such as any serious interrogation of the concepts of Britishness, diplomacy, or wives. And I think Hickman did intend it to be that kind of book, but it isn't.

I must say also that having lived abroad in three countries in the last twelve years, and having myself set up from scratch two local offices (and overseen the setting up of a third) for my various employers, I did find myself rather unsympathetic to some of the accounts of hardship reported by people whose government-funded bureaucracies weren't always able to guarantee them a perfect quality of life. In the non-profit sector things are a bit different.

In fairness, some of the hardships are very real. Hickman's father was deputy head of the British embassy in Dublin in 1976 when the ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was killed by the IRA: perhaps the most moving section in the book (and one of the longest single extracts) is her mother's description of the aftermath for the Ewart-Biggs family. ( )