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The story opens in 1895 with a New York society wedding at the fashionable church of St Thomas on Fifth Avenue. The bride-to-be is the 18-year-old heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, the daughter of the recently divorced but still socially prominent and highly ambitious Alva, and the groom is the 24-year-old 9th Duke of Marlborough, Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, known as “Sunny”.

Crowds of onlookers line the street. They are so excited that they have to be held back by policemen, while, inside the church, some women are so desperate to get a good view of the proceedings that they clamber over the elaborate flower arrangements to invade the seats reserved for guests of honour. At last, everything is ready: the 60-strong symphony orchestra has played an entire chocolate-box selection, the choir and soloists have taken their seats, the bells ring as the mother of the bride and the bridesmaids arrive, the groom and even a row of “fashionable bishops” are in place, but anxiety mounts as the minutes tick by and there is no sign of the bride. She is, it transpires, still at her mother’s house and in floods of tears; her father, William K Vanderbilt, intimidated as much by his former wife as by the thought of all the publicity, can only strive to calm his distraught daughter and get her to the church almost on time.

Alva had married for money, feeling she had no alternative, this being the only escape route from “genteel poverty” open to an attractive and ambitious young woman in 1870s America. In a sense, it was her daughter Consuelo who paid the price for her mother’s cupidity, restoring the balance by being sold off to the Duke of Marlborough, the deal being that she rescue Blenheim with American money in return for the kudos of belonging to the English aristocracy. Alva, who had brought her daughter up in habits of absolute obedience and whose will this marriage was, did not see it quite like that. The interpretation of her actions that she chose to believe and propagate was that she had married off her only daughter to an English duke for the girl’s own benefit because English aristocratic wives had far more scope for good works — opening charity bazaars, distributing crumbs from the master’s table to the deserving poor (literally, leftovers from meals at Blenheim being crammed into tins for poor retainers), and charming politicians at dinner — while the wives of American plutocrats had opportunity for little more than shopping.

Despite a weepy start to married life, Consuelo fulfilled her role admirably for several years, being prompt not only to produce the requisite heirs, but also coping gracefully and bravely with being flung into a life that, in addition to offering pitfalls of protocol and precedence at every turn, was institutionally hostile to Americans. With no experience or training, she had to learn virtually overnight how to manage a large establishment without upsetting the butler, and how to entertain the royals when they came to stay. In all this she triumphed, becoming a much-loved duchess (if never loved by the duke), while concealing her own unhappiness. The marriage quickly became one of mutual dislike and the couple formally separated in 1906.

When the mature Consuelo came to write her memoirs (they were eventually published as The Glitter and the Gold in 1952), she was at pains to stress that in her view the “glitter” of her life was represented by her time as duchess, whereas the “gold” consisted of her second, happy marriage to the French balloonist Jacques Balsan and her philanthropic and campaigning work (for women’s suffrage). She saw the glitter as unimportant and uninteresting, but the young writer Louis Auchincloss with whom she was discussing her memoirs realised that it was precisely the glitter that would interest her readers. Amanda Mackenzie Stuart has encountered the same problem in writing Consuelo & Alva: the real interest lies in Alva’s marriage to a Vanderbilt, the life of New York high society, Consuelo’s marriage to Marlborough and the life of the English aristocracy, but by the time we get halfway through the book these are over. The second marriages of both women (Alva married Oliver Belmont, “the wayward son of financier August Belmont”, in 1896) are inevitably of less interest to the reader than their first and famously unhappy ones and, however worthy the cause, the descriptions of the differing experiences and tactics of campaigners for women’s suffrage on either side of the Atlantic do not make for particularly gripping reading. The book would have benefited from being shorter, and containing fewer “may have ”s and “possibly”s.

Mackenzie Stuart is eloquent on the subject of the powerlessness of women in both British and American high society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a powerlessness symbolised by fetter-like jewels such as Consuelo’s 19-row pearl “dog collar”. There can be no doubt that Consuelo was the victim of oppression, married for her money against her will (the marriage was eventually annulled by Rome on the grounds of coercion), and then told how to behave, what to wear and what not to do by the man who benefited from that money, but it seems to me that Alva’s case is less clear-cut. She had unashamedly married into Vanderbilt money and proceeded to spend a lot of it in pursuing her own ends of social aggrandisement; to demand equal power with a husband as well as the right to spend his money seems to me to be wanting to have one’s cake and eat it. But no doubt Alva would have been only too willing to argue me into submission on this point, perhaps using the very words with which she cowed her daughter: “I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told.”

A FRIEND IN NEED

One person the newly arrived Consuelo Vanderbilt did develop a good relationship with in Britain was the Duke of Marlborough’s first cousin Winston Churchill. He was, she admitted, “tremendously self-centred” even in his early twenties, but he also had a “dynamic energy” — “we talked morning, noon and night . . . there was so much to discuss”. And when Consuelo decided to take her first tentative steps into public speaking, it was the ever-willing Churchill who helped her write the speech.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £22.50 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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