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Lily Price Hamersley became, with her 1888 marriage to the eighth Duke of Marlborough, the highest-ranking American peeress in England and the first American duchess in fifty years.
The duke was one of three distinguished, but, alas, short-lived husbands of this beauty from Troy, New York. Her first husband, Louis Hamersley, was a patrician New Yorker who left her an affluent widow at the age of twenty-eight. Her second was the brilliant but “wicked,” divorced, and socially outcast Duke of Marlborough—brother-in-law to Jennie Churchill, uncle to Winston Churchill, and father to the husband of Consuelo Vanderbilt.
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About Sally Svenson
Sally Svenson is a New York City-based author who has written articles for a number of commercial and scholarly journals about late nineteenth century American social topics—from the post-Civil-War veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, to high-society tent camping and obscure Presbyterian missionaries.
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Excerpt from the Book
Lily Price Hamersley missed the New York premiere of Viktor Nessler’s Trompeter for what she considered a valid reason. Read more
$18.95 / Perfectbound
ISBN: 9781457507762
320 pages
Also available at fine
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