“Set against the tumultuous history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this biography is certainly entertaining, but it is also a fascinating story about a remarkable woman’s indomitable spirit and will to survive. A concise, thoughtful, and well-researched biography.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[Van der Zijll’s] sparkling and propulsive biography tells the story of a woman’s success and search for a sense of belonging amid an ever-changing sea of personal losses.” —Booklist, April 15th issue

“Readers will love this captivating true story of triumph, and the pursuit of the American Dream.” ―SheReads

“What could I choose, but Diarmaid MacCulloch’s masterly Thomas Cromwell: A Life, published by Allen Lane? For those less Tudor, An American Princess by Annejet van der Zijl (AmazonCrossing, trans. Michele Hutchinson) is the story of Allene Tew, a small-town banker’s daughter five times wed, to gamblers, stockbrokers, finally royals. Light and gracefully written, it dances through a century of history, costing out the American dream like a feminine complement to the National Theatre’s absorbing Lehman Trilogy.” ―Hilary Mantel, from the Guardian’s “Best Books of 2018”

The personal story of an exceptional, courageous woman by the uncrowned queen of Dutch non-fiction. The true story of a girl from the wilderness settlements of a burgeoning new America who became one of the most privileged figures of the Gilded Age.

Annejet van der Zijl, Dutch ‘queen of narrative non-fiction’, now gives us the story of Allene Tew (1872-1955), the female Great Gatsby. An ambitious girl from the country, she had five husbands. Each marriage took her higher and higher into the wealthiest and aristocratic circles, and had her living ever more grandly, in a Park Avenue apartment in New York, for instance, to a château near Paris. It was her fourth marriage to a German aristocrat that gave her the nickname ‘the American princess’.

Her life reads like a rags-to-riches fairytale, yet it was far from being a princess’s dream. The young German aristocrat turned out to be a fascist, and out for her fortune. That she had such wealth in the first place is pretty remarkable, given that her first husband, the charming, reckless, moneyed Tod Hostetter, was an inveterate gambler who, at his death, left her with a million-dollar debt. In only one of her five marriages was she happy, to the engineer Anson Burchard. When he died, the society columns called her ‘the richest and saddest widow of the city.’

The greatest sadness of Allene’s life was losing her children. A daughter died in childhood. Her fighter-pilot son died during the First World War, another daughter in the Spanish-flu epidemic that followed. Time and again, death, treachery and disaster forced Allene Tew to pick up the pieces and start life again, in true American fashion. That coping with disaster is very much the theme of the book.

An American Princess is an engaging biography of a resilient woman, as well as a story of the making of twentieth-century America. An American Princess is a reconstruction of a fascinating life, set in America and Europe, Victorian and modern times, industrial and Russian revolutions and two World Wars. But above all it’s the personal story of an exceptional woman who had the courage to follow her own, inimitable path to the bitter end.