The American Heiress Who Wasn't Sure She Could Love... Until the Morning After Her Wedding

Alberta Montagu’s honeymoon letters, July–August 1905

She had been waiting a long time to feel this.

Alberta Sturges—twenty-seven years old in the summer of 1905, American, a woman who had spent her twenties moving between New York and London and Paris, absorbing ideas and people and spiritual teachings with an appetite that never quite found its object—had not married young. She had watched friends marry. She had sat with Vivekananda in the gardens at Ridgely Manor. She kept diaries full of self-examination. She had been, as she wrote herself, tired out by a long fight that covered many black years, uncertain whether love of the right kind would ever arrive.

And then, on July 25th, 1905, in St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, she married George Charles Montagu, heir to the Earldom of Sandwich, a man of quiet, serious character who had been patient with her doubts and whose face, she wrote to her aunt Josephine MacLeod, was “so beautifully full of God’s love.”

The following morning, she sat down and wrote to her mother.