Worth it for the photographs alone! I had a little trouble keeping up with who was who, because the writing is episodic. But there's a handy index in the back so you can follow one woman (or man) through.

I honestly enjoyed this book. I just found it terribly difficult to follow. It is not written in a narrative style but in a series of separate views of different marriages at different times. Sometimes it looped back on itself. I was intrigued by how much importance was given to US women marrying English titles (these men were definitely not royalty). And much of this because of the snobbishness of the American society! I am so glad these days are over.

The author's flowery language often seems like she's making a lot of assumptions and adding a lot of details she couldn't possibly know... unless it was mentioned in a private letter or diary, in which case, source plz. It's a good book on the subject with a lot of information, but I wish it had been liberally sourced, like many other books of this type are, and that she used terms like "probably" or "likely" more when she wanted to add colorful detail, instead of just fluffing things up to seem more interesting but really just making me question even more of the book as to what is strictly true and what is poetic license.

This was somewhere between fantastic and awful, and I can't quite decide which it was.

Because so many names were similar (Consuelo Marlborough vs. Consuelo Manchester, for instance), there was some confusion about who was whom, for me at least.

The most interesting bits were the side bars about mores, morals, appropriate behaviours, and the like. This would have been a significantly stronger book if MacColl had focused more on that, and less on the (admittedly rather similar) stories about the various American heiresses who married English Lords.

Only the first half of the book is actually book - the latter half is an appendix listing all of the American heiresses who married into England, who their fathers were, when they married, who they married, and their estates in England, plus a brief blurb about them, plus a MASSIVE index of every other sentence in the book, it seemed. I was only 48% done the book when I finished the main portion of it.

I've read enough Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian romances that the topic of this book sounded interesting, so I picked it up when it was on sale recently. As indicated by the blurb, this is a nonfiction book about the American heiresses that married impoverished British nobility, largely in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The book covers the topic thoroughly, from the society snubs that caused the "new money" heiresses to look elsewhere for acceptance, through the expected fripperies involved in a society/nobility marriage, the education and childhood of the American heiress, through to what was expected of a British noble's young wife. There was a lot of interesting information, plenty of anecdotes and individual stories of various nobles and heiresses, and quite a few pictures.

The formatting of this book for Kindle was sloppy, unfortunately, and the book's content suffered as a result. There were several "blocked off" stories used to highlight a chapter's topic, but on the Kindle they simply interrupted the original text, often mid-sentence, causing me to need to page back to catch the thread of the original text when I was done. The formatting was also strangely uneven, with pages displaying differently depending if I paged forward or backwards, although it's possible this is a Kindle quirk and not the fault of the eBook. I also found the long lists of people's names to be better suited for an appendix, rather than chunks in the actual text, and thus they seem like they were filler used just to take up space.

This was an interesting and lighter nonfiction book than I typically read, and I enjoyed it. Fans of this type of romance might find it educational, but those who are not interested in the topic or in similar romances should probably not pick this one up.

This was an enjoyable book about an interesting time. I only rated it as 3 stars because I found it a rather choppy read due to how the book is laid out. Still, a good overview of an interesting subject.

This started out really well, but it ended up feeling all over the place with sidebars, and boxes of text that were interesting, but felt like an interruption of the main book. It had the feel of a magazine article that had gotten too long. But the information was fascinating, and I enjoyed the book. I think I might have been better off reading some biographies of individual American heiresses who married British noblemen.

interesting tidbits! bizarre formatting! it was like they had too many little quippy titles so they put a title on each page or two? so the book is many, many divisions. I did enjoy the photos, it really adds to understanding the scope of the finery and fashion. as a leftist, of course, the extravagance boiled my blood. just forget everything you know about imperialism, slavery, exploitation under captains of industry for this read to enjoy the little anecdotes.