To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace

Overview:

From the Gilded Age until 1914, more than 100 American heiresses invaded Britannia and swapped dollars for titles—just like Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, the first of the Downton Abbey characters Julian Fellowes was inspired to create after reading To Marry An English Lord. Filled with vivid personalities, gossipy anecdotes, grand houses, and a wealth of period details—plus photographs, illustrations, quotes, and the finer points of Victorian and Edwardian etiquette—To Marry An English Lord is social history at its liveliest and most accessible.

My Review:

In a bit of a departure from my normal murder mystery book reviews, this is instead a work of non-fiction.  With degrees in History and Anthropology, I have a passion for all things history and British – especially the Victorian era – and this book combines both. 

This book tells the stories of the American Heiresses like Consuelo Vanderbilt and Jennie Jerome who ended up marrying into the elite of British Society.  Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough and Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill and gave birth to Winston Churchill.  There are numerous others named but those are the two names most people will be familiar with. 

These marriages were considered good matches all around as the impoverished British Peerage needed the money and the American Aristocrats wanted the titles.  On paper it was a win-win for everyone except the poor women who were basically auctioned off to the highest title holder. 

The one complaint I have about the book is how it is laid out.  There are numerous one- to two- page spreads of additional information such as styles of architecture or the various types of what the authors call Wall Street Fathers. These spreads occur throughout the book and usually in the middle of a chapter so you have to thumb through the additions to finish the main section you were reading.  It is a little distracting and would be better to have these either at the end or beginning of each section.  Once you finish the paragraph or section of the main story, you are forced to backtrack to the “secondary” sections. 

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and highly recommend it, especially if you were a fan of the PBS show Downton Abbey as the creator of that show, Julian Fellowes, took his inspiration from this book.