Product Description

On a November day in 1895, crowds of curious sightseers gathered outside St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, intent on spotting a small dapper bridegroom whom they knew to be a great English aristocrat awaiting his bride-to-be. When she arrived, twenty minutes late, anyone who caught a glimpse beneath Consuelo Vanderbilt's veil would have seen that her face was swollen from crying.

When Consuelo's grandfather died, he was the richest man in America. Her father soon started to spend the family fortune, enthusiastically supported by Consuelo's mother, Alva, who was determined to take the family to the top of New York society. She was adamant that her daughter should make a grand marriage, and the underfunded Duke of Marlborough was just the thing. It didn't matter that Consuelo loved someone else; as Alva once told her, "I don't ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you're told."

However, the story of Consuelo and Alva is not simply one of the emptiness of wealth, of the glamour of the Gilded Age, and of enterprising social ambition. This is a fascinating account of how two women struggled to break free from the deeply materialistic world into which they were born, taking up the fight for female equality. Consuelo threw herself into good works; Winston Churchill encouraged her to make her first public speech, and her social and political campaigns proved an antidote to loneliness. Alva embraced the militant suffragettemovement in America, helping to bring the fight for the vote to its triumphant conclusion and campaigning vehemently for women's rights until she died. In this brilliant and engrossing book, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart suggests that behind the most famous transatlantic marriage of all lies an extraordinary tale of the quest for female power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #472660 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1875, the strong-willed Alva Smith married an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune in order to save her own family from further descent into genteel poverty. Twenty years later, she compelled her daughter Consuelo into a loveless marriage to the ninth Duke of Marlborough, in order to provide her with a career rather than an empty life. Mother's and daughter's remarkably similar trajectories through life—difficult first marriages, happy second ones, social leadership, arts patronage, a shift into activism—were shaped by the opportunities wealth offered and the calculated use of marriage as a business transaction in their class and era. In her first book, Stuart uses a remarkable breadth of sources to follow her subjects to Newport, R.I.; India; late Victorian and Edwardian England; the heart of the women's movement; and the south of France at the outbreak of WWII She tells a riveting story but keeps her distance from her subjects, not offering final judgment on Alva's coercion of her daughter or allowing emotion to intrude on the deaths of major characters. Still, Alva and Consuelo emerge as unique and fascinating characters, and the details of their lives and times make a very entertaining read.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In a later era, Alva Smith might have been a Fortune 500 CEO, but, instead, she found an outlet for her huge energy by marrying a Vanderbilt, building magnificent houses, and especially, engineering the marriage of her daughter, Consuelo, to the Duke of Marlborough (Winston Churchill's cousin) in 1895. Disregarding Consuelo's own feelings, Alva explained that what she wanted for her daughter was a career, achievable only as the wife of an English aristocrat. As questionable as her motives might seem, they reveal the instinctive feminism that later propelled her to the forefront of the struggle for women's suffrage. It's hard to like Alva, but one has to admire her drive. And it's hard to feel sorry for Consuelo, who, though her splendid match was no happier than that of her parents, was cosseted all her life by fabulous wealth. Following her divorce she did, in fact, find a career in philanthropy. Readers who enjoy biography and social history will be fascinated by this story of two women involved in the greatest of the great international marriages of the Gilded Age. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“[A] deftly contextualized account.” (Vogue )

“An intimate look at two women whose lives reveal changing social patterns. Just fascinating.” (USA Today )

“A saga of transatlantic maneuvers worthy of Henry James or Edith Wharton.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“Astute. . . . A lively narrative. . . . Written with impressive verve and confidence.” (Newsday )

“Mackenzie Stuart has skillfully integrated a great deal of research... and she gives a rich sense of both women.” (Washington Post Book World )

“Skilfully and sympathetically told. . . . Brilliant.” (Antonia Fraser, The Times (London) )

“[A] fascinating dual biography.” (Elle )

“Riveting . . . [An] excellent biography . . . Mackenzie Stuart narrates with an elegance equal to her subject’s.” (Francine du Plessix Gray, New York Times Book Review )

“Fascinating... A thoughtful portrait of two strong, well-educated women who were more than the measure of their extreme wealth.” (Seattle Times )

“Impeccably researched . . . Mackenzie Stuart’s history marshals an impressive trove of primary documents.” (The New Yorker )

“Compellingly readable… [Mackenzie Stuart] writes... with the eye of an accomplished historian and with profound sympathy for the central figures.” (Richmond Times-Dispatch )

“Book lovers, Anglophiles and social historians alike will find much to please them in this fine, well-researched biography.” (Virginian Pilot )

“highly readable, well constructed, novelish biography…a confident and compelling book.” (Contemporary Review )

“A riveting story... Alva and Consuelo emerge as unique and fascinating characters... A very entertaining read.” (Publishers Weekly )