From Uptown Girls to Downton Abbey: How American Gilded Age Heiresses Invaded the British Aristocracy

Long before the British Invasion, the cash-strapped lords, viscounts, and dukes of Great Britain shifted their focus from hunting foxes and pheasants to more lucrative targets: cash-flush Gilded Age American socialites who were willing to trade their family’s money for an ancient title and often a chilly reception in the British aristocracy. Fans of “Downton Abbey” and “The Gilded Age” on television and film will delight as Anglophile and former U.K. resident Claire Evans recounts the tales of some of the famously loaded young Americans who infused bank accounts of many stately homes, including close relatives of Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. She’ll also give travel tips if you’d like to create a Gilded Age tour for yourself.

Claire Evans is an author, former journalist, attorney, and college lecturer who started her love of most things British as she and her mother watched countless Britcoms on PBS. She studied abroad in London and, against the odds, she married a Brit she met in Peoria, Illinois. They lived in England for a number of years. Her business, Tea with Claire, grew from friends asking for travel advice. Her memoir, High Tea and the Low Down, is the true story of what it's really like to marry a witty Englishman, move to Britain, and make every cultural faux pas imaginable.

teawithclaire.com

Image: “Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, by Carolus Duran” by Snapshooter46 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0