Based on a true story, Bellosguardo: The Lives of Anna and Huguette Clark is a novel of the Gilded Age that reaches up into the twenty-first century. When her story broke on MSNBC in 2010, Huguette Clark’s all-but-forgotten family and personal life choices were not “normal” according to postmodern thought. How did W.A. Clark get so wealthy, and did he love his second family? How did her indigent mother, Anna La Chappelle, catch the second richest man in the United States in the nineteenth century? What led their internationally educated, well-traveled, intelligent daughter to draw back from love to become a recluse in her later years? This debut novel attempts to dramatize and explore those compelling questions.
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Author’s Blog
Beautiful Anna La Chappelle and Senator W.A. Clark as they appeared in newspaper photographs of 1904 when their marriage was very belatedly announced in the United States. Andrée was a toddler in Paris and the fifth heir to the massive Clark fortune. No matter which way one viewed it, it was a scandal to Edwardian society and a massive shock to Clark’s four adult children. Huguette would be born just two years later…