Husband Hunters

The Glittering Lives of the Dollar Princesses Who Infiltrated British High SocietyTowards the end of the nineteenth century, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself was breached by a group of young women from the New World. From 1874, when Jennie Jerome, the first known 'Dollar Princess', married Randolph Churchill, to 1905, dozens of wealthy American heiresses married into the British peerage, bringing with them the glamour and sophistication of the Gilded Age.In The Husband Hunters, Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these women and their families in the context of their times. Based on extensive 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.