Sheltered and sometimes shockingly stupid British aristocrats discovered too late how willful those strange girls from the colonies could be, and the young women found themselves in a corseted world very different from the more rough-and-tumble big cities of Edwardian America.ĭe Courcy quotes Consuelo Vanderbilt, for instance, ruefully reminiscing about becoming a duchess: A few of the matches de Courcy mentions in these pages managed by fluke luck to develop into love, but the far greater majority were disasters of one duration or another.

The parents of the Americans wanted a veneer of old-world respectability for their families, and the parents of their targets wanted the enormous American dowries these young women would provide – dowries sufficient to rescue spendthrift heirs from poverty or renovate collapsing roofs on stately homes that hadn't seen an infusion of cash in generations. It's perhaps unsurprising how few of those hundreds of matches produced anything like happy marriages in every case, both sides were driven by unhealthy motives toward unhealthy goals.

Husband Hunters tells some of the most famous stories from that invasion, from Cuban-American heiress Consuelo Yznaga, who was the first American girl in this period to marry a British duke, the Duke of Manchester, to Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough, to, most famously, Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill and was the mother of Winston Churchill.ĭe Courcy is a very practiced hand at this sort of thing her earlier books, including The Viceroy's Daughters and Debs at War, likewise sort through piles of secondary sources in order to produce a string of perfect evocative anecdotes and a solid backdrop of an era. As de Courcy notes with deadpan frankness, “By any standards, this was a staggering number.” According to Anne de Courcy in her fascinating new book The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy, there was a “real invasion, and recognised as such” that took place from 1870 to 1914, when 454 American girls crossed the ocean to marry titled Europeans, including 100 who married into the British aristocracy – six to dukes.

The husband hunters