I suppose it’s the romantic in me that wanted more about Alva and Oliver’s affections. Nevertheless, the tacit thread of romance winds subtly throughout A Well-Behaved Woman’s pages. He obviously finds Alva attractive, too, although they never succumb to their unspoken feelings as long as Alva remains married to William.

Early on, she finds herself attracted to one of William’s best friends, Oliver Belmont, scion of another exceedingly wealthy family. She also dreamed of a different life, especially one that included marital love. Alva also took joy in designing and decorating houses, happy distractions from her unhappy marriage. Showering Alva with jewelry and clothes while spending more money on yachts and mansions, he essentially bought his wife’s silence while he was free to cavort and carouse wherever and whenever he chose.Īlva enjoyed motherhood (although there’s considerable irony in the fact that she rushed their daughter into a marriage as devoid of love as her own). William, grandson of the man who built the Vanderbilt fortune, sought pleasure, nothing more. Following an awkward courtship, their marriage of convenience was essentially loveless. Her family desperately needed money the Vanderbilts craved her family’s public prestige. In some ways, A Well-Behaved Woman is almost a parody of these women’s lives, although they played their roles with deadly serious intent, and Fowler smartly mirrors their facades.ĭaughter of a Southern plantation owner who had fallen into financial ruin after the Civil War, Alva belonged on a high societal rung. Underneath the façade, Alva is much more substantial (as later events would prove), but during her Vanderbilt marriage, she needed to “fit in.” Fowler does a superb job of imitating the conversations, the ostentation, the one-upmanships, the marital manipulations and machinations, the facile ignoring of obvious infidelity and indecent behavior. To demonstrate those years, Fowler necessarily has to be superficial, to write froth, because that is exactly how the wealthy women of Alva’s generation were supposed to behave. That would be a mistake! A Well-Behaved Woman is an outstanding depiction of the particular facet of Alva’s life that most fascinates Fowler-Alva’s twenty-year marriage to William Kissam Vanderbilt and her prescribed role in Gilded Age high society. Fowler made choices I might not have made, so it would be easy to critique her fictional portrayal.

As I read, I wanted a different take on this extraordinary historical figure. Such is the case with Therese Anne Fowler’s novel about Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, A Well-Behaved Woman.

It is tempting, sometimes, for a reviewer to review the book she wishes the author had written rather than the book that actually exists. A novel of Alva Vanderbilt’s twenty-year marriage in the Gilded Age. A Well-Behaved Woman, A Novel of the Vanderbilts.

A well behaved woman novel