In a Gilded Cage: From Heiress to Duchess

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

In a Gilded Cage (the title is taken from a line in an 1890s music-hall
song) comprises five “true” stories of a frenetic search for
romance, and the dispiriting sequels. The dream turned sour in many
cases, the noblemen proving to be alcoholics and womanizers.

Marian Fowler converts solid research into social history, with a
gossip columnist’s eye for food, fashion, and who pays the bill. Five
long sections trace the lives of five American heiresses, “dollar
princesses” who captured five impoverished British dukes in marriage
between 1870 and 1914. Each had something the other wanted.

Fowler’s introduction neatly psychoanalyzes 19th-century America,
explaining why a society that had rejected Britain a century earlier now
felt a kind of homesickness, and why a society whose founding fathers
had declared that “all men are created equal” had become extremely
class-conscious. The five women— Consuelo Vanderbilt, Lily Hammersley,
Consuelo Yznaga, Helena Zimmerman, and May Goelet—were the film stars
or rock idols of their time, treated like royalty and mobbed by the
press.

An unexpected part of these stories of extravagant lifestyles and the
idle rich is their contribution to our understanding of women’s
experience in this period. The True Woman of the day was pious, passive,
and “pure.” The New Woman celebrated by Shaw and Ibsen jettisoned
piety and passivity, hung onto sexual purity, and flaunted her
individuality. It was the unhappiness of most of these unions, and the
cultural shock they entailed, that forced the women into the latter
role.

Imprisoned by circumstances, the women struggled toward personal
triumphs and left, Fowler argues, an indelible mark on British society.
It is time to give them “their dignity and their due.” This book
takes us inside the false glamor of high-society life with sympathy,
insight, and wit.