The American Adventuress - C. W. Gortner Audiobook

Written by C. W. Gortner
Read by Ell Potter
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HarperAudio
Release date: September 20, 2022
Duration: 13:03:52

The story of Jennie Jerome Churchill, mother of Winston, a New York born heiress who always lived life on her own terms.

Daughter of New York financier Leonard Jerome, Jennie was born into wealth—and scandal. Upon her parents’ separation, her mother took Jennie and her sisters to Paris, where Mrs. Jerome was determined to marry her daughters into the most elite families. The glamorous city became their tumultuous finishing school until it fell to revolt.
Fleeing to Queen Victoria’s England, Jennie soon caught the eye of aristocrat Randolph Spencer-Churchill, son of the Duke of Marlborough, one of Britain’s loftiest peers. It was love at first sight, their unconventional marriage driven by mutual ambition and the birth of two sons. Undeterred by premature widowhood or society’s rigid expectations, Jennie brashly carried on a lifelong intimate friendship with Edward, Prince of Wales—a notorious bon vivant—and had two later marriages to younger men. When her son Winston launched his brilliant political career, Jennie guided him to success, his most vocal and valuable supporter.

By turns scandalous, tragic, and exciting, Jennie Jerome lived an unconventional life full of defiance—one that enshrined her as an American adventuress.

“Jennie Jerome, mother of Winston Churchill, is perhaps the first of the Gilded Age “dollar princesses,”" daughters of rich American families who married British nobility, trading wealth for titles and allowing the British aristocracy to shore up crumbling finances and ancestral estates. Gortner’s new woman-focused biographical novel, paints a sympathetic portrait of a complicated woman…. While Winston, the Boer War, and WWI all arise towards the end of the novel, this is largely a frothy tale of a bold woman, seeking fulfillment of her desires, unwilling to be hampered by social convention. As Jennie says, “Life is not always what one wants it to be, but to make the best of it as it is, is the only way to be happy.”—Booklist