pagesofjulia

The biography of a pioneering female newspaper editor in early 20th-century London.

Rachel Sassoon was the heiress daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman who was rooted in Baghdad but proud of the family’s new status after he moved them to London in 1860, while Rachel was still a baby. Only nine years old when her father died, Rachel’s options were increased by his fortune and broadened by his absence until, long past the standard marriageable age, and with considerable life experience behind her, she made what her family viewed as an unforgivable decision: she married Frederick Beer, who was also of Jewish ancestry but had converted to Christianity. (For this, Rachel was ostracized from the family until Frederick’s death, when a brother had her certified as “of unsound mind.”)

She found love with Frederick, but more importantly for posterity, she found a newspaper: Beer’s Observer drew her interest, but it took her own newspaper, the Sunday Times, to unleash Rachel’s creative and industrial spirit. She took on issues of women’s rights and suffrage, workers’ rights, the arts, criminal justice, and international political and social issues; the Sunday Times was for a decade Rachel Beer’s personal soapbox.

Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren’s matter-of-fact portrayal of Rachel’s life sheds light on the experiences of women and people with Jewish backgrounds in her time, while the stories of the Beer and Sassoon families depict larger issues regarding the era’s immigration and business patterns. The First Lady of Fleet Street is an engaging snapshot of several aspects of early 20th-century life as seen through the lens of one remarkable woman.

This review originally ran in the March 2, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: biography, history, nonfiction, Shelf Awareness |