Between 1870 and 1914, dozens of American women married into the British aristocracy: a cohort so numerous that, in time, 17 per cent of the peerage and 12 per cent of the baronetage could claim transatlantic connections. ‘At the present day, so close has the union between ourselves and the United States become that Americans are hardly looked upon as foreigners at all, so many people having American relatives,’ marvelled the octogenarian Lady Dorothy Nevill in 1907.19
