Showing results for "American Heiresses Book 2 Diamond in the Rough" in All Categories

To save her family from financial ruin, Miss Poppy Garrison accepts an unusual proposition to participate in the New York social season in exchange for her grandmother settling a family loan that has unexpectedly come due. Ill equipped to handle the intricacies of mingling within the New York Four Hundred, Poppy becomes embroiled in one hilarious fiasco after another, doomed to suffer a grand societal failure instead of being deemed the diamond of the first water her grandmother longs for her to become.

Welcome to the era of true marriages of convenience. Discover the reality of trading someone’s hand in marriage, such as an American heiress, in exchange for money, power, or political clout through compelling history lectures. Showcased in novels such as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and in present day pop culture through works like Downtown Abbey, the Gilded Age was an era of contradictions. Life on both sides of the Atlantic was grimy and glamorous, prosperous and impoverished, traditional and revolutionary.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the 20th century to seek a titled husband, beautiful, vivacious Cora Cash, whose family mansion in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilts', suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England. Nothing is quite as it seems, however: Ivo is withdrawn and secretive, and the English social scene is full of traps and betrayals. Money, Cora soon learns, cannot buy everything, as she must decide what is truly worth the price in her life and her marriage.

It is spring of 1915. Spoiled 21-year-old Clemency Jervis and her Fifth Avenue entourage board the Lusitania, bound for England, where Clemency is to marry the dashing Lord Hugo Hazzard of Loburn. A few miles off the Irish coast, the ship is torpedoed by the Germans. One of the few survivors is Clemency's maid, Hetty Brown, a young woman who resembles her mistress. Surprised to be taken for Clemency, Hetty carries out a daring deception that makes her a nobleman's wife and the mistress of a magnificent country estate, despite doubts about her among some in her aristocratic new set.