With customary spirit, she followed her then-husband to Texas, then to Clark Air Base in the Philippines-where, because of politics, very few military spouses could find employment. Therese married at eighteen, becoming soon afterward a military spouse (officially referred to at the time as a 'dependent spouse'). A story’s ability to transport her, affect her, was the only relevant matter. Little Women was as valued as The Dead Zone. With no grounding in Literature per se, she made no distinction between the classics and modern fiction. When domestic troubles led to unpleasant upheaval during her adolescence, the Rock Island Public Library became her refuge.

A reader since age four, she often abused her library privileges by keeping favorite books out just a little too long. Her passion for baseball was exceeded only by her love of books. Thanks to the implementation of Title IX legislation and her father’s willingness to fight on her behalf, Therese became one of the first girls in the U.S. An avowed tomboy, Therese thwarted her grandmother’s determined attempts to dress her in frills-and, to further her point, insisted on playing baseball despite her town having a perfectly good girls’ softball league. Therese Anne Fowler ( pronounced ta-reece) is the author of severl books, including: A Good Neighborhood (2020), A Well Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts 2018),and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013).įowler is the third child and only daughter of a couple who raised their children in Milan, Illinois.

Currently-lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Education-B.A., M.F.A., North Carolina State University.

Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules-and how to break them.

With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman.

Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built 9 mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke.īut Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement. The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.Īlva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts

A well behaved woman novel