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The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York
Anne de Courcy
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Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, fifty years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world - the New World, to be precise. From 1874 - the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known 'Dollar Princess', married Randolph Churchill - to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage, bringing with them all the fabulous wealth, glamour and sophistication of the Gilded Age.
Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the context of their times. Based on extensive first-hand research, drawing on diaries, memoirs and letters, this richly entertaining group biography reveals what they thought of their new lives in England - and what England thought of them.
Read by Clare Corbett
(p) Orion Publishing Group 2017
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Praise for The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York
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An acidly funny account of the unholy alliance between eye-wateringly rich and socially ambitious American women and a clutch of impoverished British peers . . . the extravagant ostentation that de Courcy serves up in her delectably gossip-filled book is of the sort that modern-day oligarchs still revere . . . Lively, shrewd and fresh as a gilded rose, de Courcy's book is her best yet - DAILY TELEGRAPHCleverly researched, sparkling with diamonds and wickedly funny - THE SPECTATOR 'Books of the Year'To both serious social historians and Downtonish aristo-fanciers it will be pure catnip. The book is well written and full of detail - TLSAnne de Courcy has written the definitive account of the real-life buccaneers ... [she] is excellent on the cultural clashes between the Americans and British - THE TIMES
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