Heiresses by Laura Thompson

Author:Laura Thompson [Thompson, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788548212
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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For Consuelo, the process of disentangling herself from the Marlborough marriage – which she began after just three years, with that brief flight to Paris in 1898 – was also a series of steps towards autonomy. The fact that it affected her husband was not really the point, because the marriage had never been about the union of two people.

Its annulment, together with Alva’s statement that it effectively should never have happened, made Consuelo free in a way that her divorce did not. It restored her to the self that had been forcibly buried when she was eighteen. She had been a victim, even if she also played the part rather well. Very Princess Diana; although in this case with a happy second act.

In 1957 she returned to Blenheim for the first time since the war (which she had spent in the United States, having fled France at speed in 1940). Her son was now the 10th Duke of Marlborough, and the palace presumably congenial to her at last. There was surely satisfaction in seeing what her inheritance had done for it – the replacement, and more, of what had been lost in the great sell-off of the late nineteenth century – the survival and triumph of something venerable and beautiful, thanks to her Vanderbilt millions.

Consuelo died in 1964, having outlived her first husband by thirty years. She was the last of her kind. Thereafter, if an heiress was unhappy in her marriage, it would be her own doing and nobody else’s.

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