![]() ![]() (Jennie Jerome, one of the few exceptions, married for love.) De Courcy is best at describing upper-class life on both sides of the Atlantic, but the personalities of the young women never completely shine through. The stories of women like Virginia Bonynge, Maud Burke, and Cornelia Bradley Martin are ones of wealth and power, not romance. Arranging their daughters’ marriages to impoverished British aristocrats worked the Knickerbockers, who respected titles, welcomed the brides, along with their families, into their ranks. De Courcy maintains that status-seeking mothers of nouveau riche families masterminded these transatlantic nuptials to break into the social circle of the wealthiest American families, an elite group known as the Knickerbockers. ![]() Journalist De Courcy ( The Fishing Fleet) delivers a fascinating but surface-skimming history of the wealthy young American women-novelist Edith Wharton called them the “buccaneers”-who married titled Brits in the 19th century. ![]()
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