Marjorie A. May’s first novel is based on a true story. Bellosguardo: The Lives of Anna and Huguette Clark is a meticulously researched historical 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. In an age that still worships wealth but now wants to do it publicly online, why would a reluctant heiress make the choices she made? How did her father, 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? And what led their internationally educated, well-traveled, intelligent, and very wealthy daughter to draw back from love to become a recluse? This debut novel attempts to dramatize and explore those compelling questions.
Available for purchase on Amazon in 3 formats:
hardcover
paperback
kindle
Also available for purchase in digital format from Barnes & Noble, and every major, international digital bookseller.
Forthcoming release:
Hercules Knot: A Novel of Byzantium will be published in November 2026.
In the picture, Huguette on the right and Andrée on left flank their father, William A. Clark at the public gardens he built for Butte residents.
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 it was dissected, 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…
Read about it in the novel Bellosguardo: The Lives of Anna & Huguette Clark.