2.5 stars
First Sentence: In fiction, in general, the heiress does not have a very good time of it.
Thoughts: Nor do they in real life as this book sets out to prove. It’s a survey of super-rich heiresses (mainly British with some Americans thrown in) from Mary Davies in the 17th century to Barbara Hutton in the 20th. Along the way it also chronicles the rise of women’s rights and how that didn’t stop heiresses from making stupid decisions.
Back in the late 1600s/early 1700s when the book begins, the major threat to an heiress was kidnapping. It was almost a rite of passage from rakes both young and old who were looking for an easy way to get a fortune. They would snatch the heiress, take her to a conveniently distant place with a conveniently dishonest parson and marry her. Then, since the marriage laws at the time treated women as property, the rake would have control of the heiress’ fortune. This got to be such a problem that Parliament was forced to pass laws expressing its extreme displeasure with this state of affairs. Oh, and also letting women have a little bit of autonomy after marriage.
It was a step in the right direction, but it really didn’t help much. Witness the case of Mary Bowes. After her stodgy first marriage, she fell for the extremely dodgy Andrew Stoney. When he tried to take control of her fortune, he found out that she had honest advisors and had tied it up so he couldn’t get at it. So he straight up tortured her until she signed it over to him. Then she escaped and filed for divorce. It was quite the sensational trial which ended in no divorce, but did send Stoney to jail for kidnapping, the least of his crimes.
Then we get to the American heiresses that trooped over to Europe in the late 19th century to marry titles. This was covered better and more extensively by The Husband Hunters. However, this book does give us the end of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s story. You might (not) remember her as the Vanderbilt heiress whose mother locked her up in their Rhode Island beach manor until she agreed to marry the Duke of Marlborough. She got back at him by cheating on him constantly and, after his death, mended fences with her mother. Then in the 1950s she published a memoir that glossed over the whole affair.
Meanwhile in France there was a group of lesbian heiresses that ditched their husbands to live a rich bohemian life sponsoring many up-and-coming artists that later became famous. This also marks the decline of the book’s narrative. The story starts jumping around among so many different women it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and where we are and what’s going on.
And that’s the main flaw of this book. It switches back and forth among so many different people in the same chapter that it’s almost impossible to follow. Even the chapters named after a single heiress cover many. Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, is mentioned at least once a chapter until she gets her own chapter at the end. By that point I really didn’t care about Barbara Hutton anymore because Thompson had already gone over her story sixteen times earlier.
Another thing that got on my nerves was the constant reference to what the Mitford sisters thought. Thompson’s previous book was about the Mitfords and I guess she didn’t get it out of her system before starting this one because the latter half of the book was at least 35% quotations from one of their diaries. Another 15% was quotations from Evelyn Waugh’s diaries.
If the focus of the book had been the rise of women’s rights as seen through heiresses this might have been a 4 or 5-star book. As it is, I’m going to have to get it a prescription for Ritalin or something because it really needs some kind of medication to keep on track.
The Eclectic Reviewer 