MY LAST DUCHESS by Daisy Goodwin

A long, long time ago, for every American girl (filthy rich) there was an English boy (poor but owning a great title).

The contract which was not written but well understood in advance meant that the American girl by marrying the English boy was getting the title, while her fortune got to be spent on renovating the old castle.

To make matters more accessible for the mothers of the rich American girls, there was a periodical called “Titled Americans” – that “gave details of blue-blooded but impecunious young men from Europe who were looking for a rich American bride.”

Daisy Goodwin, the author of the novel “The last duchess”, is doing justice to the female character, the rich American girl, Miss Cora CASH ( 😉 ). 

Despite Cora’s faux-pas in peer society:
(“In New York, it was the custom for a bride to wear her wedding dress for the first round of visits as a newly-wed”)
Despite Cora’s youth and naivety: 
(“The English were infuriating. Everything was designed to put an outsider at a disadvantage. If you had to ask, you didn’t belong.”)
Despite Cora’s affluence:
(“As an American heiress I have come here to buy the one thing I can’t get at home, a title.”),
Cora is genuinely in love with her future husband, Ivo.

“Cora had married a man whose real nature she did not know and, worse still, she had married for love.”

But, Ivo was British and jaded:
“He may have loved her in his way but there was nothing special about it; all he had given her was her allowed ration of love, nothing more, nothing less.”

I appreciate the work done by Cora so she can have a good marriage with Ivo, whom she truly loved and respected. I was in awe that, in spite of her American superficiality, she understood the hard work she had to do so that she can have a real marriage.

For a musical couple, like Cora and Ivo, marriage can be surmised as:

“Duets are not about individual skill but about the relationship between two players. The whole must be more than the sum of the individual parts.”

Kindle, 2017