Miss Roosevelt’s act-alike friend Miss Hadley Berg said, “To be fair, what else can you expect? These people are born inferior.” Alva wouldn’t ask.Īmong the “everyone” here were numerous haggard, bundle-laden girls and women moving to and from doorways a few old men propped on stoops or reclined against walls and the dirtiest assortment of children Alva had ever seen-barefooted, most of them-playing in the street. She would tell every Roosevelt ancestral detail if asked. The speaker was Miss Lydia Roosevelt of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, a cousin or niece (Alva couldn’t remember which) of one of the charity group’s founders. “To the devil, surely,” one of the other girls replied. “Stay together?” Alva’s sister Armide said. Limp laundry drooped on lines strung from one windowsill to the next along and across the entire block from Broome Street to Grand.
Soiled, torn mattresses and broken furniture and rusting cans littered the alleys. The buildings were crowded and close here, the narrow street’s bricks caked with horse dung, pungent in the afternoon heat. Harmon called as eight young ladies, cautiously clad in plain day dresses and untrimmed hats, left the safety of two carriages and gathered like ducklings in front of the tenement. She was twenty-one years old, ripened unpicked fruit rotting on the branch. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules-and how to break them.WHEN THEY ASKED her about the Vanderbilts and Belmonts, about their celebrations and depredations, the mansions and balls, the lawsuits, the betrayals, the rifts-when they asked why she did the extreme things she’d done, Alva said it all began quite simply: Once there was a desperate young woman whose mother was dead and whose father was dying almost as quickly as his money was running out.
With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman.
But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement. Ignored by New York's old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, written by Therese Anne Fowler, a New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.Īlva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America's great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. The New York Times and USA Today bestseller
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