Best of 2025 (or: Four Months In, and Look What Happened)

If you have a moment, please tap the heart 💗— it helps others discover Gilded Heiresses, and I’m so grateful.

To mark the turning of the year, I’m also offering 20% off an annual subscription, valid for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day only, for anyone who’d like to step inside.

Happy New Year, my fellow Gilded Age obsessives!

Between that slightly dazed stretch after Christmas — when the decorations are still up but the diary is quietly clearing its throat — and the moment we tiptoe into a brand-new year, I wanted to pause and say thank you.

Because Gilded Heiresses is still very new.
We only opened the doors on 1 September 2025 — a mere four months ago — and yet somehow, here we are.

In that short time, this little corner of Substack has:
– been constantly bobbing about on the bestseller lists
– led to an invitation (and attendance!) at the Substack Bestseller Christmas party
– grown into a genuinely thoughtful, curious, gloriously nerdy community
– and sent me off — quite literally — to Paris, retracing Alberta’s footsteps from the age of twelve, diary in hand, walking streets she once described in pen and pencil.

All of that… in four months. Which feels both thrilling and faintly absurd.

So before the new year properly begins, I wanted to share the five posts you loved most so far — in case you missed any, or fancy a reread with a cup of tea that’s already gone cold.

The Five You Loved Most

Thank You (Truly)

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for reading, subscribing, and helping shape this growing community of Gilded Age obsessives.

Thank you to those of you who have been here since day one — and to those who wandered in halfway through, lured by a title involving Dollar Princesses, letters, or emotional turmoil in very good houses.

And thank you for making this feel like a conversation rather than a broadcast.

I’ll be back very soon with new dispatches — more letters, more travel, more archives, and more of the complicated, fascinating women who crossed oceans and changed lives (including their own).

For now, I’ll raise a glass — probably something French — and wish you all a very happy, healthy, curious New Year.

With gratitude,
xx Julie