Step into the gilded drawing rooms of late 19th-century New York as we unravel the extraordinary life of William Kissam Vanderbilt, the heir who inherited everything except the appetite for spectacle his era demanded. From his birth into one of America’s most formidable industrial dynasties, to his calculated 1875 marriage to the famously ambitious Alva…

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Long before the daughters of America’s Gilded Age were crossing the Atlantic armed with enough cash to rescue half the crumbling country houses of Britain, somebody had to make the money – and not always inherited money, either.

Not the kind that arrived neatly packaged in old ledgers, under respectable surnames. No, the fortunes that built the Gilded Age were often newer, louder, and infinitely more controversial than that. They came from railway lines, oil wells, steel mills, department stores, and banking houses where fortunes could rise, collapse, or double before luncheon.

In many cases, these fortunes appeared so quickly that old-money families scarcely knew what to make of them. One moment, a man was the son of a ferryman, a dry goods clerk, or an immigrant shopkeeper. Next, he was building marble mansions on Fifth Avenue and marrying his daughters to European dukes.

But of course, making money and being accepted by society were never quite the same thing. And nowhere was that truth more painfully obvious than in Gilded Age America.

The Commodore: From Ferry Boats to Fortune

Few stories capture the spirit of American self-invention quite like that of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the man who would become known simply as The Commodore.

Born in 1794 on Staten Island to a modest Dutch-American farming and ferrying family, Vanderbilt left school at eleven and, according to family accounts preserved in early biographies, borrowed one hundred dollars from his mother to purchase his first small sailing vessel. It was hardly the sort of beginning that suggested European titles, private railway cars, or mansions in its future, but Vanderbilt possessed something that old New York often distrusted almost as much as it admired: ruthless clarity.

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Most of the American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic in the Gilded Age to marry into European aristocracy are remembered, if at all, for their weddings. The diamonds. The titles. The transactional exchange of old money for new blood that defined an era.

Muriel White is remembered for something else entirely.

Born in 1880 — three years after our own Alberta Sturges, three years after Consuelo Vanderbilt — Muriel was the daughter of Henry White, one of the most distinguished American diplomats of his generation: first secretary at the London Embassy for eight years, then Ambassador to Italy, then Ambassador to France. She grew up between Paris and London, spoke six languages fluently, moved in the highest circles of European society, and had been engaged several times — including, briefly, to Austin Chamberlain — before she married, at the age of twenty-nine, a Prussian count named Hermann Seherr-Thoss and moved to his estate in Silesia, now Poland.

What followed was one of the most remarkable stories of the entire dollar princess era. I sat down with Richard Hutto, author of The Countess and the Nazis, to find out more.

The Man Behind the Book

Richard Hutto came to the subject, as so many good historians do, through a personal connection. In 1977, as a young appointment secretary in the Carter White House, he was sent to London for the Silver Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II — and became, he says, a committed Anglophile on the spot. Years later, when he met his wife and learned that her great-aunt had been “married off at sixteen to the Earl of Craven and basically told she had nothing to say about it,” the question that had been forming in the back of his mind crystallised into something urgent.

“I understand the wives,” he told me. “You and I both call them pushy mamas — I understand that. But why were the husbands willing to write twenty-million-dollar checks to go abroad?” That question — what the aristocracy was getting out of the bargain — has driven his research ever since.

His new book, The Gilded Finale: The Bradley Martin Ball and the End of the Gilded Age, is out in January and promises to be essential reading for anyone fascinated by this world: the Bradley Martin Ball was given by his wife’s own great-great-grandparents, and the book contains original photographs that have never previously been published. But it is The Countess and the Nazis — March 2025 — that stopped me in my tracks.

The American Heiress Who Faced Down Hitler

Muriel White’s marriage to Count Seherr-Thoss was not arranged — it was, in its way, a love match. The Count had followed her to Berlin for some court functions, fallen in love with her, and three weeks later arrived at her door to ask for her hand. Her parents only found out she was engaged when they read it in the newspaper, because they were away.

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Before a Gilded Age heiress ever descended a marble staircase or glided through Newport ballrooms in a gown worth more than many people earned in a year, she had already been dressed, pinned, laced, padded, buttoned, and, quite possibly, mildly compressed into submission.

To modern eyes, the fashions of the late nineteenth century can appear effortless: elegant silk skirts, corseted waists, and gloves like a second skin for ladies, while men appeared permanently pressed, polished, and suspiciously comfortable in their towering top hats. Yet behind every seemingly effortless Gilded Age ensemble lay extraordinary engineering, social messaging, and sometimes (particularly for the women) outright physical endurance.

Because during the late nineteenth century, clothing was architecture, and from the foundations to the finishing touches, each layer had a part to play.

First Things First: The Chemise

Long before the corset entered the picture, a well-dressed woman of the 1870s or 1880s began with her underlayers. The first was typically a lightweight linen or cotton chemise, worn directly against the skin and designed to protect the more expensive outer garments from perspiration, body oils, and the general indignities of everyday life. Beneath these sat drawers, often open at the crotch for easy bathroom breaks.

It may not sound especially glamorous, but these humble cotton foundations were essential. Laundering fine silk bodices was both expensive and risky, and even the wealthiest households preferred to wash undergarments far more frequently than the garments everyone actually saw.

In other words, before fashion could be fabulous, it first had to be practical… at least somewhere.

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The Woman Nobody Remembers

There is a particular kind of erasure that happens to women in history. Not a dramatic burning of the papers or a deliberate act of censorship – just a slow, quiet disappearing. A name dropped from the guest register. A set of letters that never made it to the archive. A collection of exquisite miniature portraits, scattered to the four corners of the world, gathering dust in houses whose owners have no idea what they own.

That is the story of Amalia Kussner.

I first came across her name while researching my own corner of the Gilded Age, and I’ll admit that when I started digging, I wasn’t prepared for quite how extraordinary she was. Or quite how thoroughly she had been forgotten.

Recently, I sat down with Kathleen Langone – author, podcaster, and the woman who has dedicated years to bringing Amalia back into the light – and what she told me stopped me in my tracks more than once. This article is our beginning. And we are asking for your help.

An American in the Courts of Europe

Amalia Kussner was a miniature portrait painter, American-born, who rose to prominence in the 1890s and painted her way through some of the most storied drawing rooms in the world. The Gilded Age “400” in New York. The Astors. The Vanderbilts. And then, crossing the Atlantic, the British aristocracy at its most dazzling peak – the dollar heiresses who had arrived with their fortunes and were busy remaking themselves as duchesses and countesses.

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By the time Edward VII finally inherited the British throne in 1901, he was approaching sixty, carried more than a little evidence of a life well lived around the waist, and had already spent four decades becoming one of the most recognisable, discussed, gossiped-about, and, depending on whom you asked, exasperatingly charming men in Europe.

To the public, he was the Prince of Wales. To his friends, he was simply “Bertie”. To his mother, Queen Victoria, he was often a source of profound disappointment. And as she spent a great deal of her reign trying to uphold an image of domestic virtue and moral seriousness, her eldest son was building something entirely different: fame.

Long before he wore a crown, Bertie had become a kind of nineteenth-century celebrity. And across the Atlantic, where America’s newly minted millionaires were busy turning industrial fortunes into social ambition, they could not seem to look away…

Born to Rule… But Rather More Interested in the Guest List

Born in November 1841 at Buckingham Palace, Albert Edward was the eldest child of Victoria and her beloved husband, Prince Albert, and from the moment of his birth, it was assumed that he would one day embody the moral and intellectual ideals his parents held so dear.

Albert, in particular, approached his son’s education with almost Teutonic seriousness, overseeing a programme of study so rigid that one can only imagine even the tutors occasionally needing a restorative brandy. Bertie was expected to master languages, history, constitutional theory, religion, military discipline, and the art of behaving impeccably while everyone watched.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Bertie seemed far more interested in people than in books, in horses than in philosophy, and in dinner parties than in constitutional theory. His tutors described him as warm, affectionate, and sociable, though not especially scholarly, and while this no doubt caused Prince Albert considerable concern, it would eventually prove to be one of Bertie’s greatest assets.

He may never have become the academic prince his father had envisioned, but he possessed something arguably more useful: he understood people instinctively, remembered faces, listened carefully, charmed effortlessly, and, perhaps most importantly, knew exactly how to make others feel that being in his orbit mattered.

Marlborough House: Where Respectability Went for a Little Lie Down

After his marriage in 1863 to Alexandra of Denmark, one of the great beauties of her generation, Bertie took up residence at Marlborough House, and it was here that his real influence began to take shape. If Victoria’s court at Windsor Castle represented duty and decorum, Marlborough House represented something altogether more wild.

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The Exposition—the great Paris World’s Fair of 1900, which drew fifty million visitors over seven months—is at its height. There are palaces of electricity, pavilions of every nation, a moving walkway along the Seine. Alberta has been attending Patrick Geddes’s lectures at the Palais des Congrès every morning, thinking hard about civilisation and progress and the six primitive types of humanity from whom all history flows. She has been to garden parties at the Duchess de Rohan’s house. She has been to fortune-tellers. She has been, for months, in what she calls “one long struggle with myself.”

And today, she and Gerald go up the Eiffel Tower.

The tower had been built eleven years earlier for the 1889 Exposition—Gustave Eiffel’s iron lattice rising three hundred metres above the Champ de Mars, the tallest structure in the world, controversial from the moment the first rivet was driven. Maupassant had called it an eyesore. Others called it the shame of Paris. By 1900 it had become something else: a symbol of the century just ending, of the industrial age at its most audacious, of the human capacity to build things that had no business standing.

Alberta went up. She looked down. And something happened.

She reached for her diary and wrote:

“Today Gerald and I went up to the exposition and saw many things. In our wanderings we went up the Eiffel Tower and as I looked down from this immense height—something came to me like a revelation.”

What followed was one of the most extraordinary passages she ever committed to paper.

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…I wrote a book! It is called Secrets of an English Country House: A Year at Mapperton, and it officially drops on the 24th of September 2026.

But preorders are open now…and they come with some pretty great perks!

I’ll tell you everything about it at the bottom of this post.

But first I want to give you something better than an announcement. I want to actually let you inside the book.

So today’s piece is the first proper sneak peek. It’s a small extract, lightly stitched together, from one of the threads that runs through the book: the Gilded Age dinner table, and what happened to it when American heiresses started carrying it across the Atlantic into English country houses.

Pull up a chair.

Picture a Tuesday evening in February 1885. The Astor dining room on Fifth Avenue. Twenty-four guests, all of them on Mrs. Astor’s list of Four Hundred—the precise number, the legend went, that her ballroom could comfortably hold. The table is laid for nine courses, and somewhere in the kitchen a French chef is finishing a sauce that took three days to build.

Each place setting carries a small printed card, in French, listing the meal in order. Each guest has been seated, by the hostess, with the kind of strategic care that elsewhere in history is reserved for diplomatic summits. To her right: the most important man in the room. To her left: the second-most. The widow next to the bachelor. The bishop nowhere near the divorcée, of course.

This is what dinner looked like in the Gilded Age. It was the period’s defining performance. It was more important than the ball, more revealing than the box at the opera, and more politically consequential than almost anything else a woman of fortune could host. To be invited was to exist socially. To be left out was to vanish.

And underneath all of it—the silver, the menu cards, the seating diagrams, the velvet—was something far stranger and more interesting: the food itself.

Service à la russe, or: how to eat for three hours

Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, formal dinner in the English-speaking world was served à la française; every dish placed was on the table at once in a kind of edible centrepiece. Diners helped themselves from whichever platter was within reach. It was beautiful, and almost everything went cold.

By the time the Gilded Age arrived, the French had—confusingly—handed over their own old style and adopted the Russian one instead. Service à la russe meant courses brought one at a time, plated, often warm, in a strict and theatrical sequence. The hostess no longer presided over a groaning table; she presided over an arc.

A typical Gilded Age dinner ran eight to twelve courses: oysters, soup (clear or thick, never both), a fish course, an entrée, a roast, a sorbet to clear the palate, game, salad, cheese, dessert, savouries. Champagne with the oysters, sherry with the soup, claret with the meat, sauternes with the dessert.

Each course had its specific cutlery, which is where the much-mocked twenty-fork place setting came from. It was choreography. The fork told you what was coming next.

The cult of the French chef

There is a reason every menu card in 1880s New York was printed in French. Cooking, in this era, meant Paris. The great American hostesses competed not only on their guest lists but on the provenance of their kitchens.

At Delmonico’s—the restaurant where Mrs Astor and her circle effectively rehearsed before they performed at home—the chef was Charles Ranhofer, a Frenchman who had worked at the Tuileries. He invented Lobster Newberg, Baked Alaska, and at least the New York version of Eggs Benedict, and he wrote The Epicurean (1894), an eleven-hundred-page bible of haute cuisine that any serious Gilded Age household kept on a shelf.

If you couldn’t lure a Ranhofer-trained chef to your own house, you sent your housekeeper to Paris to train. If you couldn’t do that, you bought The Epicurean and pretended.

The point was the same in every case: the kitchen was foreign, the menu was foreign, the language was foreign, and the message, beneath all that translation, was that this household had access. Access to talent, to taste, to a Continental world the merely wealthy did not.

The menu card

We talk about the dinner. We rarely talk about the small printed object beside each plate.

Gilded Age menu cards were keepsakes. They were printed on heavy stock, often with a small ornamental border or hand-drawn illustration like a sprig of violets, a heraldic crest, or a tiny gilded line of seashells for a Newport summer. They listed the courses in sequence, the wines, sometimes the names of the guests, sometimes a verse or a date. They were collected, pasted into albums, sent to mothers. They are, frankly, why we know what these people ate.

And because the cards were French, the dishes were French…even when, as was often the case, the cook was Irish or German or American, and the duck had been raised half a mile from the back door. Canards aux Cerises sounded more imposing than “duck with cherries.” It still does.

The mathematics of the hostess

Above all the menus and the chefs and the wine-pairings sat the woman holding the seating plan.

Mrs Astor’s power did not come from her wealth; there were richer women in New York. It came from her dinners. Her social secretary Ward McAllister, who coined the “Four Hundred,” described the placement of guests as a discipline more rigorous than law. Wrong neighbour, ruined evening. Wrong evening, ruined season. Wrong season, your daughter doesn’t marry.

An invitation to one of these dinners was a license. A second invitation was a status. A first invitation withdrawn was the social equivalent of a verdict.

Edith Wharton, who grew up inside this world before she escaped from it, called it “a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.” The dining room was the room where most of those signs were written.

And then the heiresses crossed the Atlantic

When American Dollar Princesses began marrying into British country houses in the 1880s and 1890s, they carried this whole apparatus with them. They carried the expectation that dinner would be French, the expectation that there would be a printed card by every plate, and the expectation that a Tuesday in November in a draughty Dorset hall could and should look—at the table, at least—like a Tuesday in February on Fifth Avenue.

Some of them brought their own cooks. Some of them brought recipes copied out by their mothers. And some of them brought their own typewriters and began compiling cookbooks of their own.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Alberta.

Alberta’s cookbook

Alberta Sturges, who was born in 1877, married to George Montagu, the 9th Earl of Sandwich, in 1905. She was the last Countess of Sandwich to live at Hinchingbrooke, and she kept a typed cookbook.

And I found it.

It is not a grand object. It is a small, working, domestic thing: typed pages, the recipes written out in her own clipped, particular voice, the hand of an American woman who had absorbed the French menu of her New York girlhood and was now running an English country house with it.

Her duck recipe begins, in true period style, with the assumption that you can roast a duck:

Canards aux Cerises

“Roast a duck, wild or tame, and see to its being rather underdone” — to be served, of course, with a sauce of preserved cherries.

Mousse de Chocolat

“For 6 persons, place 2 tablets of a slab of chocolate in a stewpan . . . add whipped cream & a trifle of powdered sugar.”

Tomates Farcies

Tomatoes filled with butter, onion, fennel and rice — a Continental side dressed up enough for an English table.

These aren’t exactly famous dishes. Instead, they are something far more interesting: the daily, real, livable end of the Gilded Age dinner—the bit that survived the passage to England, the bit a young Countess actually wanted to feed her family and her guests, the bit that fits on a typed page in a Dorset attic and waits a hundred years to be read.

We have, in the last few seasons, started cooking from it again at Mapperton. The recipes have become the heart of what we now call the American Heiress Suppers: small candlelit dinners staged as part of our Grand Historic Tours, where the menu is Alberta’s and the table is set the way she would have set it. The Canards aux Cerises tastes, more or less, the way it tasted in 1908.

So…about the book

That cookbook, the candlelit suppers it now feeds, the dressing for dinner, the imported French menu, the seating plans Alberta inherited from a New York girlhood and rewrote for a Dorset dining room…

…these are some of the threads I follow inside Secrets of an English Country House.

Two of the chapters belong specifically to Alberta. One on the research and the archive, including the nearly ten thousand letters she left behind, the volunteer team transcribing them, the AI my husband Luke has built from her own correspondence, and more.

The other on what she left behind in objects: the journals, the devotional book of pressed flowers, the 1914 House of Worth gown that turned up in a trunk of seventeenth-century armour, and the typed cookbook.

The rest of the book is a full year at Mapperton, January to December: the house, the family, the collection, the gardens, the rewilding, the volunteers, the team.

And the photographs, honestly, are the best work we have ever done.

Publication day is the 24th of September 2026.

Pre-orders are open now, and if you order before the 23rd of September and complete the claim form, there are also a few thank-you gifts I have put together with the publisher:

If you’re already a Mapperton Live Patron:

A place at an exclusive online Patron-only Q&A with me after publication; a monthly digital gift, including a scrapbook of unpublished images that didn’t make the book, a Mapperton calendar…and more!; a Patron-only signed downloadable bookplate; and others still to be announced.

If you’re not yet a Patron:

Three free months of Mapperton Live at Hogarth (level 3), starting on publication day; a place in the draw for one of one hundred spots in a live online Non-Patron Q&A with me; a signed downloadable bookplate the moment you complete the form; and a real, mailed-to-you Christmas card from Luke and me, posted in December.

Preorder Now!

Thank you, as ever, for sitting at this table with me. There is a great deal more like this inside the book—more Alberta, more dinners, more strange and beautiful things turning up in trunks they had no business being in—and I cannot wait, in September, to put a copy in your hands.

With love,
Julie

Among them were the Gilded Age’s most glittering heiresses, both British and American, seeking respite from the social rat race, tactical marriages, and suffocating scrutiny of High Society—not to mention the stench of London in summertime.

Join us as we cast a sun-dappled eye over the coastal destinations that drew these colourful characters and learn about the fascinating stories behind these historic towns.

The Draw of Britain’s Seaside Towns

By the mid-19th century, seaside towns like Brighton, Torquay, Scarborough, and Eastbourne had transformed from humble fishing villages to fashionable playgrounds for the aristocracy.

Filled to bursting point with opulent hotels, grand estates and large-capacity spaces for balls, picnics and sporting events, these resorts drew the most affluent with promises of frivolity—and, of course, the chance to network.

Beyond that, however, people believed the seaside offered a myriad of health and social-boosting benefits:

• Health beliefs: Sea air and saltwater bathing were declared remedies for everything from melancholy and ‘nervous conditions’ to tuberculosis. Resort towns built bathing machines, promenades, and spa facilities to capitalise on the belief that salt air and cold dips could restore both complexion and constitution.
  

• Social visibility: The seaside became a stage for courtship and society intrigue. Here, the elite could maintain their social standing outside the rigid confines of London. It offered a chance to observe and be observed on promenades and at regattas, with fewer chaperones and a looser social schedule.
  

• Fashionable privacy: Scandal and heartbreak felt quietly soothed along the balmy south coast or the wild drama of Cornwall’s coves. A hastily broken engagement or ill-fated flirtation in the capital could be quietly erased at the seaside under the guise of a ‘health retreat’, which was becoming increasingly popular.
  

• Transatlantic tourism: For American heiresses seeking to both dazzle and decompress, these resorts offered a taste of England’s romanticised landscape alongside elite company. They could mingle, marry, and manoeuvre for position while enjoying the novelty of grand old hotels and Afternoon Tea beside the sea.
  

Brighton: The Original Playground

By the late 19th century, Brighton had cemented its status as one of Britain’s premier seaside resorts, famous for its unique blend of regal history and coastal charm.

Its transformation began in the mid-18th century, when Dr Richard Russell championed the health benefits of sea bathing and sea air, drawing visitors seeking therapeutic respite from urban life.

At the heart of Brighton’s allure was the Royal Pavilion, an exotic, Indo-Saracenic palace built for the Prince Regent (later King George IV) between 1787 and 1822.

The Pavilion dazzled visitors with its domes, minarets, and opulent Chinoiserie interiors, capturing the flamboyant tastes of its royal owner, who reportedly favoured it above all his residences.

After Queen Victoria sold the Pavilion to the town in 1850, it became a public attraction, hosting concerts, exhibitions, and social events.

Brighton’s lively seafront was another draw. The Royal Suspension Chain Pier, opened in 1823, offered visitors panoramic views of the English Channel and served as a landing stage for packet boats.

Though destroyed by a storm in 1896, it remained an iconic symbol of Brighton’s seaside appeal.

The town’s mixture of healthful retreats, architectural marvels, and vibrant social scene made it a fashionable destination for leisure, fresh air, and spectacle.

Torquay: England’s Answer to the Riviera

Torquay, nestled along the Devon coast, earned the nickname “the English Riviera” thanks to its mild climate, palm-fringed promenades, and picturesque harbour.

By the Victorian and Edwardian periods, it had become a refined seaside resort favoured by affluent families and naval officers.

Grand hotels like the Imperial and the Osborne lined the waterfront, offering well-heeled guests elegant accommodation and commanding views of Tor Bay.

The harbourside bustled with fashionably dressed visitors strolling along the promenades, while the sheltered bay provided safe anchorage for yachts and pleasure craft.

The town’s combination of natural beauty and genteel entertainments—including garden parties, classical concerts, and boat excursions—secured its reputation as a sophisticated coastal retreat.

Scarborough: The Coastal Darling of North Yorkshire

Scarborough was one of the earliest seaside resorts in Britain, and its spa waters and twin sandy bays have drawn visitors since the 17th century.

By the late 19th century, it had become a popular destination for the gentry and professional classes of the Midlands and northern counties.

The imposing ruins of Scarborough Castle dominated the headland, while the town’s long esplanades, cliff lifts, and Victorian bathing machines provided all the amenities expected of a fashionable resort.

The Grand Hotel, completed in 1867, became one of Europe’s largest and most luxurious hotels, known for its impressive architecture and lively social calendar, including amateur theatricals, dances, and grand dinners.

Visitors enjoyed bracing sea air, donkey rides along the beach, yacht races in South Bay, and scenic walks to Peasholm Glen.

Scarborough’s combination of natural beauty, spa facilities, and more boisterous social atmosphere set it apart from the more restrained resorts of southern England.

Cornwall & Beyond: The Wild West of Leisure

For those craving dramatic landscapes and a sense of escape, Cornwall’s rugged cliffs, secluded coves, and sweeping beaches offered a wilder alternative to the manicured resorts of the south-east.

Though more remote, Cornwall attracted wealthy visitors drawn to its natural beauty and looser social codes.

Country houses like Tregothnan, Port Eliot, and Prideaux Place hosted intimate house parties, while seaside towns such as St Ives and Newquay welcomed growing numbers of holidaymakers.

St Ives, in particular, developed a thriving artist colony by the late 19th century, where visitors dabbled in watercolours and mingled with painters in casual, bohemian surroundings.

The region’s dramatic coastal paths, popular for walking and sketching, and activities like yacht races, sea bathing, and picnics at picturesque sites such as Bedruthan Steps and Fistral Bay, made Cornwall an appealing retreat for those seeking leisure tinged with adventure.

Seaside Legacies

Today, traces of these golden summers linger in faded hotel guest books, rusting bathing machines on forgotten beaches, and crumbling sea walls battered by the salt-laden winds.

Britain’s seaside resorts, once bustling with elegant promenaders and day-trippers in their Sunday best, remain scattered with reminders of their heyday.

The weathered piers and grand Victorian hotels are living relics of a time when a trip to the coast promised health, leisure, and a bracing escape from city life.

Whether 19th-century or 21st-century, these rich histories remind us of the simple pleasure of sea air against a restless tide.

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My fellow Gilded Age obsessives,

I’m going LIVE in one hour — 6:00 p.m. British Summer Time / 1:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (New York) — with Elizabeth L. Block, author of Gilded Age Fashion.

Elizabeth also writes the wonderful , and together we’ll be discussing her new book, my forthcoming book Secrets of an English Manor House, and one of the most exciting stories from the archives:

Alberta’s House of Worth gown — the extraordinary dress belonging to our American heiress, Alberta Sturges Montagu.

I’ll be sharing what has happened to the gown, the conservation process, and its recent return from the Royal School of Needlework, where it has undergone specialist restoration. I collected it just over a week ago, and it is now on display at Mapperton House.

We’ll talk fashion, heiresses, restoration, archives, and the hidden stories stitched into these remarkable garments.

Join us live in an hour — I’d love to see you there. xx Julie

“Tomorrow I shall be twenty-two and ignorant.”

And then, in the very next sentence, the reason for hope:

“But Swami is here, and we have had long glorious talks.”

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Debutantes, governesses, and marriages brokered across continents. These were not the inventions of an exceedingly vivid imagination, but the lived realities of a woman who saw the true cost of the society she inhabited and chose to leave it. And Wharton was not alone in observing it.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of writers turned their attention to this rapidly changing world, capturing its ambitions, anxieties, and its resistance to the writing on the wall. Some wrote from within its inner circles. Others observed from just beyond them. But all, in their own way, documented the forces that shaped what we now call the Gilded Age.

These are the novels that defined it.

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A real, beautiful, published book — with pages and photographs and a cover I cried when I first saw. It is called Secrets of an English Country House: A Year at Mapperton, and it goes on pre-order today, 19th April 2026.

So, I need to tell you everything!

What is this book?

Mapperton is one of England’s most extraordinary historic houses — a honey-coloured manor in the Dorset hills, home to the Earls of Sandwich for three generations, and the place where my husband Luke and I have been building something that feels, increasingly, like a life’s work.

If you’ve read my writing here, you’ll know I don’t just live at Mapperton. I am obsessed by it. Its history, its people, its gardens, its secrets — the stories folded into every room and corridor and archive box. I have spent years pulling those stories out into the light.

This book is all of them. Or the best of them, at least.

It follows a full year at Mapperton — season by season, from the frozen quiet of January to the warmth of late autumn — and weaves together the history of the house, the family who built it, the extraordinary collections inside it, the garden that surrounds it, and the community we are creating around it. It is the book I have always wanted to write about this place.

And the photographs. The photographs! I cannot wait for you to see it.

But let me tell you about Alberta.

Because two of the chapters belong to her — and they are the ones closest to my heart.

Alberta Sturges was an American heiress who crossed the Atlantic in 1905 and married the 9th Earl of Sandwich. She became the Countess. And she left behind something almost no woman of her era did: her voice. Thousands of letters, diaries, journals — written in her slanted late nineteenth and twentieth-century hand, preserved because she asked, in pencil, at the top of so many of them: Please return.

I first heard of Alberta when my father-in-law pointed to a portrait in the Staircase Hall — a striking society painting by Ambrose McEvoy — and said, almost casually: “That is my grandmother. She was an American.”

That single sentence sent me to the archives. Then to a Master’s degree in Country House Studies, with Alberta as my dissertation subject. Then to several years in the Muniment Room, surrounded by box files sorted by decade, reading her words.

She was funny, searching, sometimes brutal with herself. At twenty-one she wrote in her diary: “I dream of being a princess — to have a large chateau of my own, to be my own mistress.” Then, in the same breath: “An excellent princess you would make Alberta, with your wrinkled face and bitter heart.”

She was born in Illinois. So was I. She was drawn to yoga and spiritual practice decades before it was fashionable. So am I. Reading her letters across more than a century, the sense of recognition has never left me.

The book has two full chapters on Alberta. One takes you into the archive and the research — including the Alberta Research Project, our extraordinary global team of volunteers who have been transcribing her letters for years, and the Alberta AI that Luke built, which lets her speak again in her own voice, drawn directly from her correspondence. The other chapter is about the objects she left behind — including a tiny devotional book called Sursum Corda (Latin for “lift up your hearts”), filled with pressed flowers and handwritten prayers and one entry, beside a friend’s name, where she has written simply: “My godchild.” A child whose entire family perished on the Lusitania in 1915. No drama. Just quiet grief on a fragile page.

And then there is the Worth dress. I knew from an old inventory that Alberta had a 1914 gown from the House of Worth. We had searched and couldn’t find it. Then, three days after I returned from the House of Worth exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris, I was rummaging through a trunk filled with seventeenth-century armour, and at the bottom — a bundle of old textiles. I unfolded them, and there was the label: C. Worth.

I burst into tears.

The dress is black and gold brocaded chinoiserie satin, with a gold lamé bodice and tulle sleeves weighted with glass beads. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever held. And it is in the book.

Pre-order opens tomorrow — and there are real gifts

I wanted to make the pre-order worth something. So here is what’s on offer.

Pre-order before 23rd September 2026 from any UK or US retailer, then complete the form.

Pre-order from UK or US retailer here

Complete the Form Here

If you’re already a ‘Countess of Sandwich Society’ or ‘Mapperton Live!’ Patron:

• A place on an exclusive live, online Patron Q&A with me once the book is published

• A monthly digital scrapbook of beautiful unpublished images that didn’t make the book

• A special Patron-only downloadable signed bookplate

• One more surprise still to come

If you’re not yet a Patron:

• 3 months of free Mapperton Live! membership at Hogarth level (level 3), starting on launch day, 24th September 2026

• Entry into a draw for one of 100 places in a live, online Q&A with me once the book is published

• A signed downloadable bookplate — as soon as you complete the form

• A Christmas card from me and Luke, by post, in December

Pre-order from any UK or US retailer, then complete the form to claim your gifts.

Pre-order from UK or US retailer here

Publication day is 24th September 2026.

I have spent years in that Muniment Room. Years learning Alberta’s handwriting well enough to copy her signature. Years trying to understand what it means to be a custodian of a place like this — its people and its history and its stories that might otherwise disappear.

This book is the answer I’ve arrived at.

I hope you’ll order and read it.

xx Julie

Pre-order Secrets of an English Country House: A Year at Mapperton from any UK or US retailer before 23rd September 2026 and complete the form to claim your gifts. Published 24th September 2026.

Pre-order from UK or US retailer here

Complete the Form Here

There is a moment in The Buccaneers where the story really begins. The novel’s central young heiresses, having unsuccessfully attempted to elbow their way into elite circles in their native New York, arrive in England for a London Season — and a chance at acceptance.

Here, they are no longer simply daughters, sisters, or companions; they are on display. Watched, assessed, and quietly measured against a whole host of rules as foreign to them as their surroundings.

Now, they are officially “out”.

It was a ritual as exciting as it was exacting, marking the moment a young elite woman stepped from the private world of her family’s home, into the unforgiving, unrelenting gaze of high society. And on either side of the Atlantic, that moment looked rather different.

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Not about anything large. That is precisely the problem. She is furious because her mother reads the newspaper when she says good morning. Furious because her father disapproves of something she has done. Furious at the sensation of being corrected, being overlooked, being treated — as she puts it — like a child.

And then, in the same diary entry, she turns the full force of her intelligence on herself. What follows is one of the most honest pieces of self-examination I have ever read.

An Excellent Princess you would make, Alberta

Alberta had been building to this moment for months. Since her mother’s return from California in February, she wrote, she had been “in one long struggle with myself.” She had spent the spring in Cannes for a friend’s wedding, then moved on to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, attending lectures by the Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes every morning at the Palais des Congrès, visiting fortune-tellers, going to garden parties at the Duchess de Rohan’s house. On the surface, a full and privileged life.

Underneath, something was wrong. She knew it. She kept writing it down.

The entry for May 29th, 1900 begins mid-storm:

Oh! the ingratitude — what is it that rises in me — in my heart up to my throat — a feeling of fighting and absolute misery. For days I have been angry and blue.

She diagnoses herself with clinical precision. There are, she writes, two different people inside her. The first has good reason, good nature, a clear vision of things — but weak character. The second is “more tempestuous, angry unreasonable and wilfully blind.” Between these two she wonders. And when the second nature takes over, she can see exactly what is happening — and is ruled anyway.

I am angry because Mother reads the paper when I bid her good morning — furious because Pater doesn’t like something I do. I feel miserable and of no use... I long to be socially recognized — I don’t give a fig for books — in fact I am unreasonable.

And then comes the pivot. She pivots so hard it almost takes your breath away:

An excellent princess you would make Alberta. With your wrinkled face and bitter heart your malicious love of fault finding. A pretty lady of the manse with your likes and dislikes.

She is talking to herself. Mocking herself. Using the fantasy she has just admitted to — dreaming of a château, of being her own mistress, of being a princess — to expose how absurd that fantasy is given the person she is currently being. It is devastating.

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If you caught last week’s article on Edith Wharton, trail-blazing Gilded Age author and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you’ll know I’ve got Buccaneers fever this month. I’ll be publishing pieces throughout April celebrating the last, yet sadly incomplete, novel Wharton ever wrote – and this week, we’re exploring the phenomenon of British governesses in elite US households.

Enter: Laura Testvalley. One of the novel’s central characters, she is composed, observant, and unmistakably English. Highly educated in languages, the arts, and all things deportment, she offers something altogether different from the world of ambition and exuberance dominating Madison Avenue and Newport’s salons.

She may be a fictional creation, but she is far from imagined. Women like her occupied a very real and very curious position within Gilded Age society, particularly in the homes of wealthy American families eager to secure not just fortune, but legitimacy.

Because, as we know, it wasn’t enough to be filthy rich in the nineteenth century; one had to be refined. And refinement, as many American families believed, was something that could be bought…

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