The Macdonald sisters -- Alice Georgiana Agnes & Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes with little prospect of social advancement But as wives & mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones Edward Poynter President of the Royal Academy & the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin In telling their remarkable story Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society & explores the life of the family in the 19th century