A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts

by Therese Anne Fowler

A woman’s lot is made for her by the love she accepts. —GEORGE ELIOT

No Knickerbocker mother would marry her daughter to a Vanderbilt. Alva Smith was the next best thing.

Status gave a woman more control over her existence, more protection from being battered about by others’ whims or life’s caprices.

Money’s no fix! the tenement girl had said. It is, though, she thought. It can be. For me, it can be. It will be. It has to be.

Alva quite liked the idea of disabusing them of that sensation, and that alone was reason to find a way in.

This was what women did, what they’d always done. She was no different from any of them—or perhaps she was wiser: she at least was gaining in status. She was directing her fate.

One does not follow the example, one sets it.

An intelligent woman in this world takes her chances where she finds them.

From the ashes arises the phoenix, so the story goes.

As she often told her children, a person should stand up for what he or she believed in. Set the example for others.

She was a queen of society, an angel in the house, a benefactress to those in need, and still her husband had betrayed her.

Alva had spent most of her life perfecting the art of good behavior; let it serve her for at least a little while longer.

“I’ll go to hell, you mean? What a convenient argument! A man may do as he will as regards his vows, but if a woman should break them, she faces eternal damnation.”

“I would like gentlemen to stop provoking in their wives the desire to divorce them! Perhaps that is the lesson our esteemed friends will take away from this parting of one of our ‘great men’ from so much of his money.”