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But Fowler''s portrait is so nuanced, so complicated by context, and so informed by her own capacious generosity that we can''t help being drawn in. I dare you not to dive right in."-Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin "In another writer''s hands, Alva Vanderbilt''s immense wealth and carefully calculated life might have proved barriers to readerly sympathy.

Alva provides a fascinating prism for the challenges and pleasures of era, and is endlessly engrossing as a character, full of action and vision and will-just the sort of woman I love knowing more about.

This is a delicious book, as well as a timely one." -Melanie Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Girls in the Picture "In this captivating novel about the indomitable Alva Vanderbilt, Therese Fowler plunges us with wonderful energy into New York''s Gilded Age.

Therese Anne Fowler has brought this compelling, complex woman to such dynamic life that she leaps off the pages. A Well-Behaved Woman is an extraordinary portrait of a strong, fascinating woman who rose above societal convention and even her own expectations to become so much more than anyone might have predicted." -Christina Baker Kline, New York Times Bestselling author of A Piece of the World and Orphan Train "The story of Alva Vanderbilt is long overdue for a telling, but it was worth the wait. Therese Anne Fowler takes us behind the velvet drapes of the Vanderbilt mansions in the late 19th century, exposing a world of passions and betrayal in which all is not as it seems. "History comes alive in this immensely readable novel. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules-and how to break them. With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman. But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement. Ignored by New York's old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America's great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. The New York Times and USA Today bestseller The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, written by Therese Anne Fowler, a New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.