Deal!ĭe Courcy is at her sharpest on the blood-curdling determination with which American mothers fought for inclusion in Mrs Astor’s magic circle, but these terrifying harpies were hardly less subtle when it came to dragging their daughters on to the flesh-market of English society. They needed cash America’s robber barons, enriched by their shrewd plundering of oilfields or proliferations of railroads and steel mills, lacked only ancient titles and suitably historic houses to provide an ersatz sheen of authenticity for their new wealth. The British aristocracy was on its uppers, its rent-rolls drained by years of bad harvests. On this side of the pond, however, there was no such parading of worldly goods.
A mere $20,000 a year for a jewel-encrusted couture wardrobe made in Paris by the Empress Eugenie’s favoured costumier Charles Frederick Worth, with an import tax of $10,000 when it arrives? Sweetheart, it’s so, so worth it.
The English reader’s role here is that of entranced spectator at an American carnival of excess. Think fin-de-siècle trashy: tycoons smoking tobacco in $100 bill roll-ups their wives hosting three-course banquets for jewel-beladen lapdogs. It covers the period from 1874 to 1914, but the extravagant ostentation that de Courcy serves up in her delectably gossip-filled book is of the sort that modern-day oligarchs still revere.
Her latest, The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York – an acidly funny account of the unholy alliance between eye-wateringly rich and socially ambitious American women and a clutch of impoverished British peers – puts paid to that notion. Over four decades, Anne de Courcy, in books such as The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj, The Viceroy’s Daughters and Debs at War, has trained her gimlet eye on the social aspirations and patrician absurdities of a world that we might imagine had vanished for good.
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