On the afternoon of February 7, 1911, carriages were diverted off Madison Avenue and a police line held back the crowds outside St. Bartholomew’s. Inside, Vivien Gould, granddaughter of the railroad baron Jay Gould and still a teenager, married Lord Decies, a forty-four-year-old English army officer. The church had been turned into a conservatory of tropical plants. The papers had called the match the engagement of the season.
Two weeks later, the prequel to The Wreckage Between Us begins. It is a book about a marriage arranged by men who hold a debt, and this is the world it is set in.
Were marriages really arranged in the Gilded Age?
Rarely on paper, but in practice, constantly. A daughter’s marriage was the largest financial decision her family would make. Mothers managed the introductions. Fathers and lawyers managed the money. A girl could refuse, in theory. In practice she was very often persuaded, pressured or simply outlasted.
The most famous example is Consuelo Vanderbilt. She was secretly engaged to an American, Winthrop Rutherfurd, when her mother, Alva, decided she would marry the ninth Duke of Marlborough. Alva cajoled, begged and finally ordered. Consuelo married the Duke at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan on November 6, 1895, and spent the morning of her wedding in tears. One account has Alva posting a footman at her daughter’s door that morning to stop her running.
What was in a marriage settlement?
It was money, set down in writing. Consuelo’s 1895 settlement included a $2,500,000 trust with a guaranteed income of $100,000 a year for the Duke. The couple separated in 1906 and divorced in 1921. In 1926 the marriage was annulled on the ground that it had been coerced, and Alva herself told an investigator: “I forced my daughter to marry the Duke.”
The American heiresses who married into the European aristocracy were nicknamed dollar princesses. The line runs from Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874, to Vivien Gould in 1911 and beyond.
Could a woman get out of it?
Rarely, and never cheaply. Divorce was scandalous in Society. When Alva Vanderbilt divorced her husband in March 1895, it shocked New York, even though she walked away with a fortune. Most women in unhappy marriages stayed in them, lived apart quietly, or waited.
Why readers love the trope
Arranged marriage is one of the most loved tropes in historical romance because it turns the usual order upside down. The vows come first and the wanting comes after, or the wanting comes first and the vows go to someone else. In dark historical romance the trope bites harder, because the history behind it was real. Somebody always paid for these weddings, and it was not usually the groom.
In The Wreckage Between Us
In The Devil’s Asking Price, Duncan Ainsley inherits his father’s shipping concern and his father’s debt. The men who hold that debt have already chosen his wife. The woman he wants is not on their list.
Start with the prequel, and read the series in order. If you want more books built on bargains and bad men, try our list of dark historical romances with villain heroes.
A Caller