Meghan Markle has a hard time in the press. But look to literature, and you’ll see this is nothing new.
Whether you love them or loathe them, there can be little doubt that the story of the artists formally known as Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Sussex has captivated nations both sides of the pond.
Some view them as the ultimate modern power couple: her drive, his romanticism and their joint optimistic aspirations thwarted by his family’s stiflingly traditional values. Others see her as a scheming, ambitious arriviste, and him as the hapless lapdog strung along in the wake of her plotting.
But either way, the story of American women setting sail across the Atlantic to bag themselves an Englishman is nothing new. Think of the Dollar Princesses who flocked to these shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is thanks to them that we had Winston Churchill (whose mother, Jennie Jerome, was one such flocker), and our first female Member of Parliament to take her seat was the American-born Nancy Astor. Meanwhile Consuelo Vanderbilt became Duchess of Marlborough and plain old Mary Leiter from Chicago became Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston and Vicereine of India. And the list goes on: Lady Cunard (née Mary Bache McEvers), The Hon. Mrs Bertrand Russell (Alys Whitall Pearsall Smith), The Duchess of Roxburghe (May Goelet), Lady Charles Cavendish (Adele Astaire, sister of Fred), and, of course, The Duchess of Windsor to cap them all off. Incidentally, in 2011 Madonna – an American woman who was then married to an English man – made a film about Wallis Simpson and George VIII that sunk without a trace.
Such a clash between the old world and the new is ripe stuff for fiction, and literature in both America and Britain has reflected the meeting of these two cultures.
Some view them as the ultimate modern power couple … others see her as a scheming, ambitious arriviste, and him as the hapless lapdog strung along in her wake. – Violet Hudson
In Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1879), Isabel Boncassen is the American beauty, “alive to all that was going on”, who has set her sights on Lord Silverbridge, the Duke of Omnium’s heir. The Duke has other ideas, however: no granddaughter of an American labourer could befit a Ducal spouse. Isabel is trouble, but nevertheless her charm and wit win through and, by the end of the novel, the Duke has consented to the match. Trollope was alive to the ambivalence felt by the English upper classes towards the influx of Bright Young American Things. On the one hand, they represented all that was crass, brassy and frighteningly futuristic. On the other, they were the future: like it or not, and they tended to bring much-needed money and freshness with them.
Two years later, Henry James was telling the story from his side of the Atlantic with another character called Isabel – this time Isabel Archer, heroine of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Although this Isabel eventually marries a fellow American ex-pat, the action – as with James’s other novels – takes place mostly in England and Europe and the prevailing morals are therefore definitely old-world. In James’s hands, however, Isabel becomes the schemed-upon rather than the schemer. The same is true of poor Milly Theale, of James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), who is ruthlessly plotted against by two morally bankrupt Londoners who want to steal her fortune and leave her, literally, for dead.
Today, American women are a powerful force for good, offering emotional rehabilitation for the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped souls of the Englishmen. – Violet Hudson
Edith Wharton, in The Custom of the Country (1913), had no such qualms about portraying her American protagonist as a social-climbing strategist. The marvellously named Undine Spragg marries first an impoverished American who cannot keep her in the style to which she wishes to become accustomed; then a Catholic French count, of whose staid traditionalism she soon tires. Finally her first love, an American mid-Westerner, comes good. But she still hankers after the social status that only European aristocracy can confer: as the novel closes, she is pondering what life would be like as the wife of an English ambassador.
In the twenty-first century, the trope has more often been seen on our screens than between the pages of our novels. Think of Cora in Downton Abbey, a modern interpretation of the Dollar Princess, or, indeed, any Richard Curtis film. These American women are a powerful force for good, offering emotional rehabilitation for the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped souls of the Englishmen that they (often unwittingly) seduce.
It remains to be seen whether the final verdict on Meghan Markle will deem her a saviour or a succubus. In the meantime, at least she has a precedent.
Violet Hudson is a freelance journalist. She contributes to Tatler, the Spectator, Standpoint and the Catholic Herald.
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