The Husband Hunters Quotes

“The young Winston Churchill used to stand in the doorway of a ballroom, rating female looks on the Helen of Troy basis: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ he would ask a friend standing with him, receiving in answer a murmured: ‘Two hundred ships?’ as a young woman passed. ‘By no means,’ Winston would respond. ‘A covered sampan or a small gunboat at most.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“I don’t want to die with grey hair’, she told a friend. ‘It’s so depressing.’)”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“Her defeat did not stop Mrs Fish exercising her sharp and often cruel wit even against those she counted as friends. She even stood up to the formidable Alva, a close confidante, when Alva accused her of telling all their friends that she, Alva, looked like a frog. ‘No, no!’ cried Mamie, ‘not a frog! A toad, my pet, a toad.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“By the late 1890s spending had become more than just a mark of status, a weapon for rising in society, a wish to be surrounded only by the best, a form of self-aggrandisement or even a way of giving pleasure to others, but simply an end in itself and even a validation of identity – I spend, therefore I am.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“By what ethics does any free government impose taxes on woman without giving her a voice on how and by whom these taxes shall be used and applied?’ she asked in her clear, sweet voice. ‘Women constitute a majority of the people of this country and are entrusted with the most vital responsibilities of society. They bear, rear and educate men, train and mould their characters, inspire the noblest impulses in men, and often hold the accumulated fortunes of a man’s life for the safety of the family – yet they are debarred from uttering any opinion by public vote.’ Scandal was forgotten; applause swept the hall as she finished.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“Tennessee Claflin’s was the most unlikely story. Although, like most of them, she was good-looking, unlike the others she was not rich, she did not have a mother to chaperone, support or dragoon her, she lacked formal education and had no superb clothes from Worth. Instead, she had lived by her wits – managing en route to become one of the world’s first female stockbrokers – and in her native US was trailed by an aura of scandal and sexual licence. Ironically, it was the latter which gave her her first real step up the ladder.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“Between 1875 and 1905 over forty American girls married into the peerage, bringing with them the dollars that saved many a stately home from ruin. There were many attempts to calculate the total amount of American dollars spent in dowry payments; one estimate said that American brides had brought in $50 million to Britain, but the probability is that it was nearer a billion dollars – money that went straight into the pockets of the men they married.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“Nowhere was this conflict between principle and worldly interest better exemplified than in the marriage of the various dollar princesses to the scions of aristocratic British families. There was a curious dichotomy between two opposing attitudes – triumph at an American girl having scooped up such a prize in the teeth of native opposition, interwoven with resentment at the thought that an American husband was not good enough – which were often found in uneasy reconciliation in the same article.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“His family, like hers, was horrified, her brother-in-law John ‘Jack’ Leslie writing to his wife, Jennie’s younger sister Leonie: ‘I hope G. West has survived the honeymoon.’ (Jennie had once been described as ‘more panther than woman’.)”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“From henceforth he is dead to me. I want to know nothing. He has deserted me at my hardest time in my hour of need & I want to forget him tho’ I wish him every joy & luck & happiness in this life…”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“His appetite was enormous: he would eat a breakfast of haddock, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock before a day’s shooting, lunch and dinner of ten to fourteen courses, elaborate teas, snacks of lobster salad or cold chicken, with a cold chicken left by his bed at night in case he became hungry.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“In strode Mackay and, without pause for thought, strode up to Bonynge and punched him in the face with a right and left, knocking him to the floor. Bonynge scrambled to his feet and both these sixty-year-old men, hardened by their early days in the mines, fought like tigers, knocking over chairs and desks and sending inkpots flying so that ink streaked the walls. ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen! This will never do!’ cried the horrified president, but neither listened. Finally, they were separated by half a dozen of the bank staff. ‘It was a regular possum and wildcat fight,’ reported the Lewiston Daily Sun the next day. ‘Their clothes were so torn and their faces so bloodied afterwards that they had to slip away unseen through a side door in a couple of cabs.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“However, he did not hesitate, even though shaken by Anna’s response – which could, and indeed was, a disclaimer to a business deal – when he suggested she took his family’s religion, Catholicism. ‘I will never become a Catholic,’ said nineteen-year-old Anna, with a steeliness worthy of her father, ‘because if I were to do so, I should not be able to divorce you, and if I were not happy I would not remain your wife for a moment longer than was necessary.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“a real live count ought to be a passport for them [the Gould family] into the innermost of the inner circles, which privilege they so much crave,’ said the New York World, showing a lively appreciation of the truth that the simplest way for a family to elevate itself into the top level of New York society was through the strategic marriage of a daughter.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“My dear sir, I do not argue, I inform.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“If you are going to refuse, do so at once, but remember that a dinner once accepted is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend the dinner”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“A dinner made up wholly of young people is generally stupid.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“One such family, the Stewarts, went as far as building a mansion opposite that of Mrs Astor so that she could not avoid seeing them. What perhaps they did not realise was that she so guarded the exclusiveness on which her myth was founded that she would not even go near her own windows lest the crowds that thronged Fifth Avenue hoping to catch a glimpse of the rich and famous should see her.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“It took some time for acceptance to be reached, and at first she was bitterly lonely (‘It is not all a bed of roses to live in a strange country and I am as strange to the people and their ways as they are to me’),”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy