Breathlessly awaiting the next episode of HBO’s The
Gilded Age? Get your fix of ballroom intrigue with one of these!
To Watch:
Deemed nouveau riche and shunned by elitist New York
society, sisters Nan and Virginia St. George, along with their friends Lizzy
Elmsworth and Conchita Closson (Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino), try their
luck in London. The girls' New World spontaneity and impertinence constitute
nothing less than a social invasion of Old-World society and they soon find
themselves courted by a coterie of fascinated admirers. But as the old and new
worlds come to clash, something has to give.
Based on the Nobel Prize-winning novels by John Galsworthy,
The Forsyte Saga is an epic and highly praised series spanning three
generations of the powerful Forsyte family at the turn of the 20th century.
Beneath the family’s imposing veneer lies a festering core of unhappy and
brutal relationships. Damian Lewis (Homeland) stars as greedy, tormented Soames
Forsyte with Gina McKee (Notting Hill) as his reluctant bride, Irene.
Boston, 1876: At a Women's Movement meeting, fiercely
independent Olive (Vanessa Redgrave) becomes mentor to gifted young orator
Verena (Madeleine Potter) - who soon attracts the amorous attentions of Olive's
Southern cousin Basil (Christopher Reeve). The contesting demands of courtship
and sapphic friendship in this love-triangle in all but name are further
complicated by New York society matron Mrs. Burrage, who tries to secure Verena
for her son. Merchant Ivory explores the subtle power struggles between sex,
class and the Women's Movement at the heart of Henry James' classic novel with
delicate precision and a marvelous sense of social milieu.
A brilliant, moving portrayal of an aristocratic American
family in what many critics consider a masterpiece equal to Citizen Kane. Based
on a novel by Booth Tarkington, the drama begins in the 1870s when the Amberson
family is at the height of its wealth and prestige. But the day arrives when
all the Ambersons are stunned by the truth of their financial ruin.
Based on E.M. Forster's novel of requited love. A young,
independent-minded, upper-class Edwardian woman who is trying to sort out her
burgeoning romantic feelings, divided between an enigmatic free spirit she
meets on vacation in Florence and the priggish bookworm to whom she becomes
engaged back in the more corseted Surrey. Funny, sexy, and sophisticated, this
gargantuan art-house hit.
A young society woman's love for a common journalist
presents her with an impossible decision: leave him or marry and face a life of
poverty. Events take an unexpected twist when she befriends a lonely young
heiress whose own tragic secret offers an irresistible but
dangerous solution.
Musical set in the 1890's about a professional matchmaker
who meets her match.
Margaret and Helen Schlegel are sisters from a well-educated
European family. A series of events brings them into a relationship with the
very English Wilcox family. Both families also come into contact with Leonard
Bast and his wife, a couple near the lowest tier of the rigid class system.
Leonard's desire for cultural and intellectual status attracts the attention
of Helen. Margaret must reconcile her independent spirit with her desire for
companionship and a comfortable place in Edwardian society. Her moral strength
is eventually able to resolve the tangle of opposites.
Based on Thackeray's satire of the beautiful and clever but
poor Becky Sharp, who is determined to earn her place in society.
A ravishing romance about three wealthy New Yorkers caught
in a tragic love triangle, the ironically-titled story chronicles the grandeur
and hypocrisy of high society in the 1870's.
Directed with a keen sense of ambiguity by William Wyler,
this film based on a hit stage adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square
pivots on a question of motive. When shy, emotionally fragile Catherine Sloper
(Olivia de Havilland, in a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning turn), the daughter of
a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome
spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by
the promise of romance. Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she
believes they are? Or is Catherine's calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct
in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker? A graceful drawing-room drama
boasting Academy Award-winning costume design by Edith Head, The Heiress is
also a piercing character study riven by emotional uncertainty and lacerating
cruelty, in a triumph of classic Hollywood filmmaking at its most
psychologically nuanced.
Catherine, a lonely young woman, is swept off her feet by
the handsome Morris Townsend. Suspicious of the young man's true intentions,
her father threatens to disown her if she follows her heart and marries against
his wishes.
To Read:
FICTION
The
American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin
Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the
twentieth 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.
The
Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian,
Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true
identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our
nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and
Victoria Christopher Murray.
The
Address by Fiona Davis
After a failed apprenticeship, working her way up to head
housekeeper of a posh London hotel is more than Sara Smythe ever thought
she'd make of herself. But when a chance encounter with Theodore Camden, one of
the architects of the grand New York apartment house The Dakota, leads to a job
offer, her world is suddenly awash in possibility--no mean feat for a servant
in 1884. The opportunity to move to America, where a person can rise
aboveone'sstation. The opportunity to be the female manager of The Dakota,
which promises to be the greatest apartment house in the world. And the
opportunity to see more of Theo, who understands Sara like no one else. and is
living in The Dakota with his wife and three young children.
Cartier’s
Hope by M.J. Rose
New York, 1910: A city of extravagant balls in Fifth Avenue
mansions and poor immigrants crammed into crumbling Lower East Side tenements.
A city where the suffrage movement is growing stronger every day, but most
women reporters are still delegated to the fashion and lifestyle pages. But
Vera Garland is set on making her mark in a man's world of serious journalism.
Shortly after the world-famous Hope Diamond is acquired for a record sum, Vera
begins investigating rumors about schemes by its new owner, jeweler Pierre
Cartier, to manipulate its value. Vera is determined to find the truth behind
the notorious diamond and its legendary curses.
Murder
at the Breakers by Alyssa Maxwell
Newport, Rhode Island, August 1895: She may be a less
well-heeled relation, but as second cousin to millionaire patriarch
Cornelius Vanderbilt, twenty-one-year-old Emma Cross is on the guest list for a
grand ball at the Breakers, the Vanderbilts' summer home. She also has a job to
do--report on the event for the society page of the Newport Observer. But Emma
observes much more than glitz and gaiety when she witnesses a murder.
The
Social Graces by Renee Rosen
A peek behind the curtain at one of the most remarkable
feuds in history: Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor's notorious battle for control
of New York society during the Gilded Age.
A
Well Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler
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. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by
those who know the rules-and how to break them.
NONFICTION
The
Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy
by Anne de Courcy
A deliciously told group biography of the young, rich,
American heiresses who married into the impoverished British aristocracy at the
turn of the twentieth century – the real women who inspired Downton Abbey.
Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the
context of their times.
Passing
Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by
Martha Sandweiss
Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western
history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author
and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War,
King was named by John Hay "the best and brightest of his
generation." But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts
and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double
life-as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and
as a black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.
When
the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age by
Justin Kaplan
Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day,
cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New
York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of
ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior. Kaplan
exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the
Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural
appreciation, and pure reading pleasure.
The
Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach
A captivating biography of America's first female tycoon,
Hetty Green, the iconoclast who forged one of the greatest fortunes of her
time.
Empty
Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great
American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a
property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty
years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and
loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor
politics.
The
First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man
whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. We see Vanderbilt
help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape
Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation.
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