Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE HUSBAND HUNTERS

Anne de Courcy

Social Climbing in London & New York

A vivid insight into the world of the real Downton Abbey

A vivid insight into the real world of Downton Abbey, telling the story of the young American heiresses who married impoverished landed gentry in Britain, bringing their sought-after fortunes with them. THE HUSBAND HUNTERS is another brilliant book from a master of her craft lively, witty, and populated with a broad cast
of beautifully-drawn characters. Readers will be fascinated by these young women looking for passion, romance and social capital, among them novelist Edith Wharton and Alva, daughter-in-law to Cornelius Vanderbilt.

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne de Courcy is an acclaimed biographer and journalist. Her book THE FISHING FLEET spent 7 weeks in the Sunday Times Bestseller list and has been optioned for TV by Baby Cow.

Now working on CHANEL'S RIVIERA, for Weidenfield and St Martin's Press, to deliver June 2019.

Available products
Book Published 2017-06-01 by Weidenfeld

Comments

De Courcy conceals her research with a couturier's touch. Her prose swishes and rustles like a flounced taffeta petticoat. She knows that this is a lot of balls, as it were, but she relishes the dance cards, the flower arrangements, the menus, the strings of jewellery, all the stuff that made these matriarchs tick. Their obsession with climbing the icy cliff-face of New York society might seem pointless to us, comic and tragic in its stultifying boredom'', yet she brings their ascent racily alive their descent, too.'

Golden Arrow Productions

Delectably gossip-filled history

Over four decades, Anne de Courcy has trained her gimlet eye on the social aspirations and patrician absurdities of a world that we might imagine had vanished for good. The HUSBAND HUNTERS is 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. Lively, shrewd and fresh as a gilded rose, de Courcy's book is her best yet. I can't wait to read it again.'

Anne de Courcy has a sharp instinct for absurdity and there is much of that in this entertaining book. De Courcy engagingly takes a serious look at the differences between the largely matriarchal American upper-class society of the day, run by women, for women.'

St. Martins

De Courcy paints a rich canvas.'

Anne de Courcy combines the perseverance of a social historian with the panache of the novelist'

This is a sparkling and richly entertaining account of an intriguing and unusual culture clash

To both serious social historians and Downtonish aristo-fanciers it will be pure catnip. The book is well written and full of detail