Ladies and Not So Gentle Women

The subjects of this book have all but disappeared from common memory. Yet all four women led lives that were noteworthy and made contributions to fin-de-siecle American cultural life and WWI relief efforts that went beyond the ordinary. Elisabeth (Bessy) Marbury supported herself as a literary agent who represented many of the foremost playwrights of her day, including Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Clyde Fitch, and who produced musicals with the likes of the Shubert brothers. She inspired the two women with whom she was the most intimately involved to seek independent lives in ways that were hardly conventional at the beginning of this century. Anne Morgan, J.P. Morgan's daughter, became deeply committed to improving working conditions for women and then undertook relief work in France during the First World War, as did her later lover, Anne Vanderbilt. Bessy's long-time companion, Elsie deWolfe, was the first person to fashion interior decoration into a career and is still remembered for her innovative dispatch of Victorian fussiness. She too served devotedly in the relief effort in France. Lewis (Man of the World: A Biography of Herbert Bayard Swope) tells the story of the women's achievements, interconnections and associations within the worlds of fashion and celebrity in immense detail, punctuated by frequent negative comments on the foibles of his subjects and their wide circles of friends and acquaintances. Regrettably, this book so absorbed with surface and appearance has no accompanying illustrations. (Feb.)