The rebirth of a woman to the manor born

"Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age"
by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
HarperCollins, 579 pp., $37.95

She was the mother from hell, and her daughter was the poor little rich girl — an American heiress who was railroaded into marrying a British aristocrat to satisfy the older woman's social ambitions.

"I don't ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told." That's what Consuelo, the teenage heiress, remembers hearing from her Mommie Dearest, as reported in their fascinating dual biography, "Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age," by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart.

In Stuart's hands, the story reveals the social climbing and much else behind their gold-plated last name, but it also yields a thoughtful portrait of two strong, well-educated women who were more than the measure of their extreme wealth.

Yes, the book offers the titillating details of what money and status can buy: For Alva, this meant mansions inspired by Versailles, costume balls so lavish that they belonged to the record books and a yacht so big that it once was mistaken for an enemy craft. For Consuelo, the bounty included a British castle with too many rooms to count (the estimate is 170), a fiefdom that included townspeople who regarded her as an angel and a Gosford Park lifestyle.

But the larger point of the book is that Alva and Consuelo ultimately rebelled against the "gilt cage" to which women of their time and station were relegated. Each in her own way became a pioneer, and in both their similarities and striking contrasts they give a glimpse of the shifting status and perceptions of women.

Stuart is alert to their opposing circumstances. Alva, née Smith, was the product of a cultivated Southern family whose fortunes dwindled rapidly after the Civil War. Marrying a Vanderbilt helped reverse the slide.

In her effort to become the doyenne of both Fifth Avenue and society's summer watering hole of Newport, R.I., Alva enlisted the press, initiating the idea of the society column by offering sneak previews of her decorating and party plans. After she reacted to her husband's infidelities by having a fling of her own and then divorcing him, she needed a new headline. This time she snared a blue blood for her only daughter.

Once again, she helped launch a trend, trans-Atlantic unions, by pushing Consuelo into marriage with the Duke of Marlborough in 1895.

For her bookish and sheltered 18-year-old daughter, however, liberation from her mother's control exacted a heavy price: a loveless marriage to an unlikable man who needed her substantial dowry to maintain the family estate. Inevitably, they separated and eventually divorced, and in her search for purpose, Consuelo became politically active in England and was even elected to local office in London.

As the story evolves, Stuart shows how Alva the materialist gave way to Consuelo the idealist, and how influence began to flow the other way. Ironically but perhaps predictably, Alva picked up her daughter's crusade for women's suffrage and became one of its strongest advocates in America.

Stuart approaches her subjects with good sense and good taste, weighing the evidence and their own statements to suggest that Alva, at least, engaged in some revisionist history. "While I am perfectly willing to admit my own part in consummating Consuelo's marriage," she said later in her life, she claimed that she had her daughter's interests in mind. She wanted Consuelo in a more enlightened place, "where she was given the widest possible field for serious activity," as opposed to an "environment that asked only frivolous amusement."

Stuart parses the mores of the leisure class and gives a clear sense of its vapidity.

Clearly, her sympathies lie with Consuelo — perhaps because of the positive reputation she built for herself as an English duchess but certainly because of her more modern and humanist values.

At the same time, Stuart is not blind to the circumstances that gave Alva her less admirable priorities. The woman whose marriage to William K. Vanderbilt was based on their shared desire for social prominence gave way to a daughter who transcended it. The fact that both women found happy second marriages is a satisfying coda but hardly essential to the story of their privileged lives.

Ellen Heltzel is a writer who lives in Portland. Her column can be found at goodhousekeeping.com/bookbabes.