'An acidly funny account of the unholy alliance between eye-wateringly rich and socially ambitious American women and a clutch of impoverished British peers. 'Cleverly researched, sparkling with diamonds and wickedly funny.' Jane Ridley, The Spectator, 'Books of the Year' (UK) de Courcy is excellent on the cultural clashes between the Americans and British.' - The Times (UK) 'Englishmen found the dollar princesses irresistible and were drawn to their vitality, social ease and lack of stuffiness. 'Anne de Courcy has a sharp instinct for absurdity and there is much of that in this entertaining book.' Literary Review (UK) 'A highly readable social history that contains all of the juicy drama of a prime-time soap opera.' Kirkus 'Vanderbilts, Astors, Churchills, Marlboroughs diamonds, tiaras, yachts, mansions all are documented in glorious detail and should satisfy those readers with insatiable thirst for all things peerage.' - Booklist 'Fascinatingenough glitz and glamour to enthrall those who couldn't get enough of the recent royal nuptials.' - Publishers Weekly 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.

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.Īnne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the context of their times. 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.

The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. A deliciously told group biography of the young, rich, American heiresses who married into the impoverished British aristocracy at the turn of the twentieth century the real women who inspired Downton Abbey.

The husband hunters by anne de courcy