The Husband Hunters: Social climbing in London and New York
Anne de Courcy

• Thursday 15 June 2017, 7.40PM to 8.30pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
• K/133, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (map)
• No wheelchair access

Event details

Towards the end of the 19th century and for the first few years of the 20th, 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, 50 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.

Join Anne de Courcy, author of The Husband Hunters, as she 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, she reveals what they thought of their new lives in England - and what England thought of them.

About the speaker

Anne de Courcy is a writer, journalist and book reviewer. In the 1970s she was Woman’s Editor on the London Evening News until its demise in 1980, when she joined the Evening Standard as a columnist and feature writer. In 1982 she joined the Daily Mail as a feature writer, with a special interest in historical subjects, leaving in 2003 to concentrate on books.

Anne is chair of the Biographers’ Club and a past judge of their annual prize. Her biographies include The Viceroy’s Daughters, Diana Mosley and Debs at War and Snowden: The Biography. Her other books include The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj, published in July 2012 and Margot at War: Love and Betrayal in Downing Street, 1912-1916, published in November 2014 and shortlisted for the Paddy Power Political Book of the Year Award. 

Waterstones

Books will be available to buy from the Waterstones' stall at this event.

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