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New York Times bestselling author Laura Thompson returns with Heiresses, a fascinating look at the lives of heiresses throughout history and the often tragic truth beneath the gilded surface.Heiresses: surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife's inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. And in modern times, heiresses fell victim to fortune-hunters who squandered their millions.
Heiresses tells the stories of these million dollar babies: Mary Davies, who inherited London's most valuable real estate, and was bartered from the age of twelve; Consuelo Vanderbilt, the original American "Dollar Heiress", forced into a loveless marriage; Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress who married seven times and died almost penniless; and Patty Hearst, heiress to a newspaper fortune who was arrested for terrorism. However, there are also stories of independence and achievement: Angela Burdett-Coutts, who became one of the greatest philanthropists of Victorian England; Nancy Cunard, who lived off her mother's fortune and became a pioneer of the civil rights movement; and Daisy Fellowes, elegant linchpin of interwar high society and noted fashion editor.
Heiresses is about the lives of the rich, who-as F. Scott Fitzgerald said-are 'different'. But it is also a bigger story about how all women fought their way to equality, and sometimes even found autonomy and fulfillment.
List of contents
Introduction
Part I: Unprotected
Part II: American Dreams
Part III: New Worlds
Part IV: Unprotected, Revisited
Epilogue
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Index
About the author
Laura Thompson is the author of several critically acclaimed works of non-fiction. Her first book
The Dogs: A Personal History of Greyhound Racing won the Somerset Maugham Award.
Rex V. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award. She has written biographies of Nancy Mitford and Agatha Christie,
A Different Class of Murder about the Lord Lucan scandal,
The Last Landlady about her grandmother, and the
New York Times-bestselling
Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters.
