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A sparkling social history of the ´Dollar Princesses´, the young American heiresses who married into the English aristocracy.

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. 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. 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.

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

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An acidly funny account of the unholy alliance between eye-wateringly rich and socially ambitious American women and a clutch of impoverished British peers ... the extravagant ostentation that de Courcy serves up in her delectably gossip-filled book is of the sort that modern-day oligarchs still revere. Think fin-de-siecle trashy... Lively, shrewd and fresh as a gilded rose, de Courcy´s book is her best yet. I can´t wait to read it again Miranda Seymour THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

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de Courcy, Anne

Anne de Courcy is the author of thirteen widely acclaimed works of social history and biography, including THE HUSBAND HUNTERS, THE FISHING FLEET, THE VICEROY´S DAUGHTERS and DEBS AT WAR. In the 1970s she was Woman´s Editor on the LONDON EVENING NEWS and in the 1980s she was a regular feature-writer for the EVENING STANDARD. She is also a former features writer and reviewer for the DAILY MAIL.

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