In her 1935 memoir of life in Gilded Age New York, “King Lehr” and the Gilded Age, Bessie Lehr paints a dramatic picture of Alva as a “valiant warrior to whom opposition was the breath of life. Nothing made her happier than the knowledge that she was pitting herself against the rest of the world. She loved to see herself as a pioneer, to make others bend to her will, to have them follow her in the end, meek, sheeplike.” But even she couldn’t have anticipated what was to come.
