ABSTRACT
Transatlantic marriages aroused such strong emotions that little attempt was made to discover the real titled American, hidden from view by racial and class prejudice. What little attention that has since been paid to American women in the peerage, moreover, has done nothing to contradict the heiress stereotype. American women married into the titled aristocracy of Europe for a variety reasons, and in this chapter on the public and social role of titled Americans we shall see how these women met the challenge of living in a traditional aristocratic society. Some of the autobiographical material used as evidence here will be familiar from other historical and biographical texts of the period, but the aim of the present study is to demonstrate the gap between the American heiress stereotype and reality, and the evidence will be presented within this very specific context.
