“Family Romance [is] Jean Strouse’s brisk, wise and admiring survey of an unusually long client relationship that signaled a tenuous shift in British society . . . Strouse confronts prejudice unblinkingly but with a historian’s grace for evolving mores . . .”

― Walker Mimms, The New York Times 

“Family Romance captures wonderfully what Strouse says Sargent himself captured in his paintings: a time of ‘fading grandeur and fresh energies, the colors and shadows, the dazzle and unease of a world in flux.’”

― Jim Kelly, Air Mail

“Acidly delightful . . . Strouse has an astute eye for the era’s swerves and twists . . . 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