The Husband Hunters: A Review

The Husband Hunters by Anne de Courcy is a nonfiction book about American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (the precise years given are 1874-1905; most of the action takes place in the 1890s). The paperback copy that I have is billed, on both the front and the back cover, as being about “the women who inspired Downton Abbey” and, indeed, the reason for and nature of the exchange being made in these relationships is obvious to anyone familiar with the main family from that show: for British lords, saddled with large, expensive estates, costly lifestyles, and debts, marrying an American young woman who came with a huge dowry was an appealing way to solve your financial problems without having to solve anything, and for American daughters of industrialists (and, more often, their families), connecting yourself to aristocracy instantly tarnished any unwanted new money shine.

So, the premise is pretty simple, and most of the background is basic enough that anyone with an entry-level grasp of American and British history doesn’t really need further context explained to them to understand the narrative being presented here (and the book doesn’t offer much more). All you really need to know about how the British aristocracy works is the rule of primogeniture, and who the Prince of Wales is; all you need to know about American development is a hazy sense of westward expansion and how it made several names you recognize very, very rich.

All that said: The Husband Hunters is maybe the most baffling pop-history book I’ve ever read. I finished it having honestly no idea how to rate my overall experience with it. It’s very clearly the product of detailed research, but the narrative is so simple to almost feel sloppy. I’m not confused about what the book wants me to think, but I am confused about why any of the information was presented in the way that it was. I can see that the author is fascinated by this era and the women in it, but I’m not sure if, like, she knows why she is…? Anyway, let’s discuss.

The first thing I want to talk about, because this was what constantly struck me reading it: this book really needed better editing. On the sentence level, it had an annoying tick of run-on sentences that bugged me a lot, but that’s nothing to the frankly really weird choices with structure.

When you’re writing a book like this, light history for a general audience that’s relatively short and not dense, painting a picture of an era largely through profiling several key characters, you have several choices about how to organize it. Do you go chronologically, knowing that there’s a lot of overlap you’ll have to navigate around to avoid being confusing? Do you go by themes, focusing on key locations or shared elements of the stories here, but risk burying and blurring the specific people involved? Or do you section out the individual stories, knowing that they follow very similar trajectories and could get repetitive?

Well, apparently the answer is that you make a play at all three, and it’s instantly frustrating. The book basically intersperses chapters that focus on a key theme, idea, or recurring location with chapters that function as mini biographies of individual women. And that would work, if they all flowed together in a way that felt like a coherent narrative; in other words, if it felt like a deliberate choice. But it just mostly feels like a mistake, like a weird consequence of not having enough focus, or maybe not enough material in the first place. My overriding question for this author after finishing her book was girl, what on earth did your outline look like, because I can’t imagine it having one that made sense or had an editor look at it.

Like, okay, here’s an example that drove me up a wall while I was reading. Chapter 7 is titled “Alva” and it tells the story of Alva Vanderbilt, who married into the Vanderbilt wealth and then devoted herself to reaching the very top of society, including through forcibly marrying off her daughter Consuelo. The chapter, fairly short as they all are, takes us through a tour of Europe where Consuelo makes her debut, with her mother determined that she will marry the Duke of Marlborough, and ends us on this cliffhanger: “What Alva did not know was that on the Valient cruise Consuelo and Winthrop Rutherfurd had fallen in love.”

Drama!

The next chapter, “Newport,” begins like this:

It was in Newport that the seventeen-year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt was kept a prisoner by her mother Alva in her enormous ‘cottage’, the Marble House, until she agreed to marry the man of her mother’s choice. This captivity was probably the most extreme example of maternal husband-hunting, in a setting that represented the extreme of social exclusivity.

What follows is about eleven pages of description of Newport, RI as one of the loci of social life among the moneyed New York society. Then we return to the Vanderbilts, with another two pages before we get back to the relationship between Consuelo and Rutherfurd that we had been primed to discuss. Consuelo’s captivity, which so prominently opened this chapter, is discussed relatively briefly and then we move on to a little more about Alva, before the chapter ends with a denouement of a final paragraph that is entirely about Newport.

The stuff about Newport is interesting and well-researched and clearly relevant (as it comes up a lot as a location in subsequent chapters). But I honestly have no idea why you’d structure it in the middle of this dramatic story that you’ve hyped up – the introduction to the chapter is not the first time that Consuelo Vanderbilt’s fate is mentioned in this book before we get to it – in a way that honestly feels more like listening to someone start to tell a story only to get halfway through and realize they need to give you a whole bunch of backstory for the ending to make sense than like a nonfiction book stringing together a solid argument about the influences and context of the era.

That lack of any kind of deliberate structure permeates the book, and it’s super frustrating because when I read nonfiction I want to get a sense that the author has command over the way they’re ordering the information they’re telling me. Here, I don’t, and this confusion over the structure comes through in the paragraph-level signposts as well. So many of the chapters follow from their antecedents with transitions as clunky as the ones I outlined above and some of them feel honestly like high-school level “this is how you write a transition statement” writing, e.g.: “Far from shrinking from society like Virginia Bonynge, Maud Burke could hardly get enough of it.” The worst moment might actually be in the introduction, when de Courcy states that she will now introduce the girls who she will feature specifically in the book. The first several (Jennie Jerome, several Astors and Vanderbilts, the Wilsons) get short biographical sketches 1-2 paragraphs in length before the whole thing devolves into a laundry list of women mentioned with little context that gives away the issue with the structure – because some of the women thus tossed off (e.g. Tennessee Claflin) get a whole chapter devoted to them while others do not. So it doesn’t end up as a helpful preview of the people we will be spending the most time with and how the structure of the book will go, but more a list of names to look out for later and a shortened version of the stories we’ll later read in more detail anyway.

In a book with stronger content, this kind of structural confusion might be just a detriment, but for this book the lack of focus and organizational clarity exposes the shallowness of the history being explored here.

First, I should say: the book is obviously extensively researched judging by how extremely dense the details of each scene are. Every marriage, giant mansion, and society event depicted has a ton of information about the people, the clothes, the décor, and the money spent. You could take some of these scenes and use them as instructions for the production design on a movie set.

But, that level of intricacy really does stop at the scene level. I said at the beginning that you can go into this book knowing very little history, but this book makes very little attempt to fill in any of those gaps for you. I don’t mean that it doesn’t explain the context of individual pieces of information – explainer footnotes and parentheticals do pop up occasionally, though even those are frustratingly inconsistent – but more that it has no interest in drawing any strong conclusions about either how the two societies shaped the people at the center of this narrative, or how the specific social phenomenon being examined went on to have any kind of impact on the following century or decades after it ended.

Probably the most frustrating moment in reading this book for me was getting to the epilogue, where the author briefly (and I do mean briefly) sums up the Gilded Age coming to an end with more of a turn to social consciousness movements, and points out that the giant influx of money from these marriages is basically why so many British estates didn’t completely fall apart and why many are now open to the public. The epilogue concludes with a rapid-fire list of some other accomplishments by the women and their descendants which only served to make me mad since most of them were not discussed in the actual text of the book. Apparently Nancy Astor was England’s first female Minister of Parliament. That sounds like it might be really interesting! I’d like to hear about how that happened. Unfortunately, the only page number listed next to her name in the index is the one for this epilogue. Anyway, the actual final sentence in the epilogue is:

And their descendants, from the amazing 20^th Earl of Suffolk (son of Daisy Leiter and the 19^th Earl), hero of numerous incredible wartime exploits, to Winston Churchill, perhaps our greatest Prime Minister, made an indelible mark on our history.

First of all: I’d either forgotten or ignored the fact that Anne de Courcy is British while reading, so the sudden first person pronoun (entirely absent up to this point) was honestly hilarious.

Second of all: the book honestly feels more interested in the American setting and like the British setting is more of a background, for the simple reason that the stories set in America are just more interesting. For example, by far the best trivia in the book is when we go through the backstory of an American heiress that involves the California gold rush, silver mining in Nevada, rich Americans embarrassing themselves in Paris, and an insane feud between two families culminating in two sixty year old men brawling in an office. All of that, and some of the other stories, are deeply entertaining to read, but then they just kind of stop at the end of the documented narrative. Throughout the book, I’d been vaguely thinking about whether it made more sense for a British or American audience, and without checking the publication information (it was indeed published in the UK first) I hadn’t been able to come up with a convincing argument for either. And that’s because this book does a terrible job at locating itself within either British or American history in a way that sheds any light on either beyond the immediate events of the narrative.

This is most apparent, to me, on the American side. For one example of what I mean: reading a book that’s largely about American society in the late nineteenth century that mentions race, racism, and the civil war so few times I could probably count it on one hand felt really deeply weird. (Just about the only gestures in this direction were some mentions of when families being profiled had made their money in or had roots in the antebellum south – and even then, many of these instances were little more than a statement that a southern accent or regional tie was the one inter-American regional difference the British could tell apart.) Or, even leaving that aside: for a book focused on the very top of society, it has shockingly little to say about class stratification in America in the Gilded Age. Beyond a few scattered mentions of robber barons and railroads, you almost get the impression that this new group of wealthy families sprung up from a vacuum, and that, once they were done marrying into the British aristocracy, they faded away again.    

So, this book isn’t interested in exploring American society or history beyond these women. Fine. But it isn’t really interested in doing that with Britain, either. The short discussion in the epilogue I described above is the first time we get into any discussion of the impact of these marriages on the UK beyond the short-term impact on the social circles and drama surrounding the Prince of Wales. So, like – who is this historical nonfiction for?

After the epilogue, in the acknowledgements, de Courcy lists several people who either have noble titles themselves or are clearly related to those who did. And it becomes apparent, here and in the bibliography, that a lot of the sourcing for this book came as primary sources or conversations with people personally connected to this history. And that’s very cool. But it wasn’t until I was reading those acknowledgements that I realized what this book really is. It’s not a tightly-woven narrative of a specific group of people or a detailed biography of a few specific women; the structure is too loose and lacking in momentum for that. And it’s not a snapshot of a specific time in American or British history using one theme as a focus; the history presented is way too shallow for that. It’s a gossip sheet, an albeit well-researched accounting of who said what and who wore what and who married off their daughter to a lord. And that’s alright, I suppose. It was entertaining enough that I was able to finish it. But in the end, I was left with mostly the same historical understanding I entered with, a few funny stories about the excesses and scandals of the extremely wealthy around the turn of the century, a deeper understanding of the usefulness of editors in nonfiction, and some thin trivia about Winston Churchill’s mother. I rated it two stars on Goodreads.