Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt PDF Author: Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060938250
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 626

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Consuelo Vanderbilt'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—forcing a heartbroken Consuelo into a marriage she did not want with the underfunded Duke of Marlborough. But the story of Consuelo and Alva is more than a tale of enterprising social ambition, Gilded Age glamour, and the emptiness of wealth. It is a fascinating account of two extraordinary women who struggled to break free from the world into which they were born—a world of materialistic concerns and shallow elitism in which females were voiceless and powerless—and of their lifelong dedication to noble and dangerous causes and the battle for women's rights.

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt PDF Author: Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060938250
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 626

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Consuelo Vanderbilt'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—forcing a heartbroken Consuelo into a marriage she did not want with the underfunded Duke of Marlborough. But the story of Consuelo and Alva is more than a tale of enterprising social ambition, Gilded Age glamour, and the emptiness of wealth. It is a fascinating account of two extraordinary women who struggled to break free from the world into which they were born—a world of materialistic concerns and shallow elitism in which females were voiceless and powerless—and of their lifelong dedication to noble and dangerous causes and the battle for women's rights.

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt PDF Author: Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0066214181
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 609

Get Book Here

Book 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 suffragette movement 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.

Consuelo and Alva

Consuelo and Alva PDF Author: Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fabulously wealthy New York beauty marries a cold-hearted British aristocrat at the behest of her Machiavellian mother - then leaves him to become a prominent Suffragette.

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter in the ‘Gilded Age’ (Text Only)

Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter in the ‘Gilded Age’ (Text Only) PDF Author: Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007445687
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 718

Get Book Here

Book Description
The family trees contained within this ebook are best viewed on a tablet. A fabulously wealthy New York beauty marries a cold-hearted British aristocrat at the behest of her Machiavellian mother – then leaves him to become a prominent Suffragette.

American Duchess

American Duchess PDF Author: Karen S. Harper
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN: 9781643852492
Category : FICTION
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reimagines the life of American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt as the reluctant and bullied bride of the Duke of Marlborough before she finds the inner strength to fight for women's equality.

A Well-Behaved Woman

A Well-Behaved Woman PDF Author: Therese Anne Fowler
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250095492
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
The New York Times and USA Today bestseller The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, written by Therese Anne Fowler, a New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement. With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules—and how to break them.

The Glitter and the Gold

The Glitter and the Gold PDF Author: Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 1444731009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

Book Description
Consuelo Vanderbilt was young, beautiful and the heir to a vast family fortune. She was also deeply in love with an American suitor when her mother chose instead for her to fulfil her social ambitions and marry an English Duke. Leaving her life in America, she came to England as the Duchess of Marlborough in 1895 and took up residence in her new home - Blenheim Palace. The 9th Duchess gives unique first-hand insight into life at the very pinnacle of English society in the Edwardian era. An unsnobbish, but often amused observer of the intricate hierarchy both upstairs and downstairs at Blenheim Palace, she is also a revealing witness to the glittering balls, huge weekend parties and major state occasions she attended or hosted. Here are her encounters with every important figure of the day - from Queen Victoria, Edward V11 and Queen Alexandra to Tsar Nicholas, Prince Metternich and the young Winston Churchill. Causing a scandal by separating from the Duke after 11 years, Consuelo began her new life as philanthropist, public speaker and campaigner for women's suffrage. Her literary soirees would include H G Wells, JM Barrie and George Bernard Shaw. In 1921 she remarried aviator Jacques Balsan moving with him to a chateau in the South of France. This intimate, richly enjoyable memoir is a wonderfully revealing portrait of a golden age.

Fortune's Children

Fortune's Children PDF Author: Arthur T. Vanderbilt, II
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062288377
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 601

Get Book Here

Book Description
Vanderbilt: the very name signifies wealth. The family patriarch, "the Commodore," built up a fortune that made him the world's richest man by 1877. Yet, less than fifty years after the Commodore's death, one of his direct descendants died penniless, and no Vanderbilt was counted among the world's richest people. Fortune's Children tells the dramatic story of all the amazingly colorful spenders who dissipated such a vast inheritance.

Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt PDF Author: Anderson Cooper
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006296464X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty—his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts. One of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021 When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by “the Commodore,” subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers—the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius’s grandson and namesake had built—the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all. Now, the Commodore’s great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family’s empire, basked in the Commodore’s wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other. Written with a unique insider’s viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

The Legend of the First Super Speedway

The Legend of the First Super Speedway PDF Author: Mark Dill
Publisher: BookBaby
ISBN: 1098335163
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Legend of the First Super Speedway," is a gritty tale punctuated by humor that chronicles the hero's journey through the pioneering age of American auto racing. It is a factual, previously untold story that must be read for a thorough understanding of auto racing history.