BOOKS REVIEW: Sisters of Fortune: America’s Caton Sisters at Home and Abroad
Exclusive interview with novelist Jehanne Wake and a review of her new novel about the Caton sisters
Rating: 4 stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I was wondering how these Southern belles ever got used to such cold,” says Sisters of Fortune author Jehanne Wake. “They didn’t. They hated the ‘beastly’ Scottish weather. They wore heated underclothes, fur-lined little jackets over their flimsy Regency dresses, carried muffs containing small heated stones sewn into the lining and traveled with heated bricks at their feet in carriages.” And surely lots of fires in the vast, freezing Scottish castle where the sisters had stayed.
Sisters of Fortune is the story of four 19th Century American heiresses. Marianne, Louisa, Bess, and Emily Caton were looking for husbands. What were four Catholic Americans women to do? Three, Marianne, Louise and Bess, went to England and married aristocrats. Emily went to Canada and married there. But, would these headstrong, independent women be happy as just wives?
Their grandfather, Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, made sure the four girls were well educated. These women were unusual in that they were taught how to manage their inheritance. They wrote many letters to each other and other members of their family. The details in there letters opens a window into the time they lived in and what they did during their lives. The book features sixteen pages of color, 16 pages of B&W photos and two maps.
“Money started me off, as I could never accept the long-held assumption that rich women didn’t understand investments and had no interest in finance in the 19th Century,” says Wake. “When I found a letter by Bess Caton advising a female friend to buy bonds ‘as if peace continues the fives will rise above a hundred and one we’d now get very nearly 5 & 1/2 % interest buying at 92′, I knew I had to write about her and her sisters and how they came to be lady speculators.”
Working on private collections of letters in the owners’ houses can offer strange situations. Like being left locked in a one-room ducal estate office whenever the secretary had to go over to the big house to show a tour group round, which took hours.
“I was hoping there wasn’t a sudden emergency or need for a lavatory,” says Wake. “At least it was a warm room.”
Wake started with a diagram of everyone the Caton sisters knew, their family and friends and the central dates. “Then I searched for letters, journals and diaries in public and private collections and read printed sources of memoirs. It is like fitting pieces into an enormous jigsaw of their lives.”
Wake’s agent is Deborah Rogers of Rogers Coleridge & White in UK. “A fellow writer recommended Deborah and I remembered that our 4-year-old daughters had attended the same music class. As we later laughingly recalled, they’d been rather naughty pupils. I got in touch and we met up to talk about what I had written and wanted to work on and she said she’d like to represent me.” Wake is represented by Melanie Jackson in the U.S.
At this time there are no plans for Sisters of Fortune to be made into a movie.
Wake also wrote Princess Louise: Queen Victoria’s Unconventional Daughter. Wake is currently working on an idea for another Anglo-American book. “I’m gripped by the history of the connections between the two countries, the shared ancestral memories,” says Wake.
Wake lives in West London. She was born in North Africa while her father was working abroad.
Sisters of Fortune: America’s Caton Sisters at Home and Abroad. Hardcover, 416 pages, Publisher: Touchstone (April 5, 2011), Language: English, ISBN: 978-1451607611 $ 27.00
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