Content area
Full text
Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age * Donna M. Lucey * New York: Harmony Books, 2006 * xii, 340 pp. * $25.95
With this dramatic narrative, Donna Lucey vividly depicts the troubled metamorphosis of a "golden couple" who once "appeared to live in a cocoon of success and celebrity" (p. 4). A native of New York, "Archie" (John Armstrong Chanler) was a scion of the Astor family. When he was a teenager, however, his privileged existence was shaken by his mother's death in 1875 and his father's in 1877. Those tragedies did not prevent him from becoming a rich, well-educated lawyer. In 1887 at the fashionable resort town of Newport, Rhode Island, he met Amélie Rives, who enchanted him, and they wed the following year. "But," Lucey declares, "America was not ready for Amélie Rives" (p. 64). Beautiful, charming, ambitious, independent, manipulative, and audacious, she was also...