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Betsy Prioleau

Goodreads Author

Born

November 14

Website

http://www.betsyprioleau.com

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Biography

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September 2012

URL

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Betsy Prioleau is the author of Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age (Abrams Press, 2022), Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them (W. W. Norton, 2013), Circle of Eros (Duke University Press), and Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love (Penguin/Viking). She has a Ph.D. in literature from Duke University, was an associate professor at Manhattan College, and taught cultural history at New York University. She lives in New York City.

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Survival Guide for Women in the Gilded Age

2. Assume you’re a “true woman” of the Gilded Age and fate has handed you a raw deal. You had been carefully trained in the virtues of submission, self-sacrifice, timidity, and passive acquiescence to your lot. You were a pale hothouse flower, too frail for the rough usages of the world. Hence the fainting couch and laudanum.

3. Miriam Leslie, though, was not the fainting type. She was raised in a rough school and developed hide and life smarts at an early age. Illegitimate and likely biracial, she lived a pillar to post existence in a disheveled household with an absentee, bankrupt father. At fourteen she took matters in her hands and petitioned the court to make an uncle her legal guardian in the absence of “some proper person” to look after her.

4. She steeled herself with a big sense of self and cultivated bulldog tenacity, resilience, chutzpa, and cunning. She needed all the armor she could muster for the crises and obstacles ahead. She walked the mean streets of Manhattan at eighteen, and over a lifetime endured spousal abuse, two business failures, workplace prejudice, two business failures, Society snubs, courtroom battles, cutthroat competitors, and theft of her publishing company.

5. Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox complained that she could be “cold as an iceberg.” Miriam admitted she was a “match for Satan.” But in the Gilded Age you couldn’t be a creampuff and “angel in the house” and survive. Not with enemies at the door and a crush of serial setbacks hardships, and disasters. It came with a cost, but Mrs. Leslie came out roaring, a victor on a cruel, uneven playing field.

6. Learn more about Miriam's life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age Available Now

Assume you’re a “true woman” of the Gilded Age and fate has handed you a raw deal. You had been carefully trained in the virtues of submission, self-sacrifice, timidity, and passive acquiescence to your lot. You were a pale hothouse flower, too frail for the rough usages of the world. Hence the fainting couch and laudanum.

Miriam Leslie, though, was not the fainting type. Sh

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Betsy Prioleau’s books

Average rating: 3.61 · 1,602 ratings · 225 reviews · 7 distinct works • Similar authors

	Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love 3.72 avg rating — 843 ratings — published 2003 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age 3.50 avg rating — 560 ratings — published 2022 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them 3.52 avg rating — 246 ratings — published 2013 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age by Betsy Prioleau (Goodreads Author), Beth Hicks (Narrator) really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Seductress Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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Betsy Prioleau is currently reading

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Jan 19, 2022 12:39PM

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Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

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The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe

by Elaine Showalter

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Jan 19, 2022 12:36PM

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Betsy’s Quotes

“Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge and the last”
― William Blake

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“It's not the men in your life that matters, it's the life in your men.”
― Mae West

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“Prepare yourselves
for the roaring voice of the God of Joy!”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

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