Sisters Of Fortune

Product Description

The first American heiresses took Britain by storm in 1816 two generations before the great late Victorian beauties. The four Caton sisters were descended from the first settlers in Maryland & brought up in Baltimore by their grandfather Charles Carroll one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. These Catholic Southern belleswere expected to 'marry a Plantation'. But they were independent fascinated by politics clever with money romantic in mood. Arriving in Britain Marianne Louisa & Bess were swept into the set of the Duke of Wellington who loved Marianne until his death. In London the three sisters forged their own destinies in the face of intense prejudice against both Americans & Catholics. (Meanwhile Marianne's sister-in-law Betseyhad married Napoleon's younger brother Joseph to the Emperor's fury & found herself abandoned in Paris.) While Emily stayed at home marrying a Scots-Canadian entrepreneur & running the Baltimore households the widowed Marianne shocked the world by marrying the Wellington's wayward elder brother the Duke of Wellesley Lord Lieutenant of Ireland & appearing as a ' Catholic Yankee' among the Protestant Anglo-Irish. Louisa eventually became Duchess of Leeds & a friend of Queen Victoria while the sphere in which Bess shone was the stockmarket as queen of speculators. Based on intimate unpublished letters Sisters of Fortune is a glorious book. Everything is here -childbirth & coronets gossip & politics the call of faith
- & above all the power of wealth. This is a brilliant portrait of love between sisters & of Anglo-American relations through this period. But it is also a most unusual story of money of the power it gave these women particularly over the men in their lives & how it shaped social & even international relations round them.