A Mansion of Her Own: The Mysterious Life of Heiress Alice DeLamar

"A journey through the bedrooms and drawing rooms of the twentieth-century art world where luminaries expressed forbidden sexual desires and found inspiration for much of the art they created.The book is so good, I picked it up and barely breathed until I was finished." -Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street WomenIn 1918, at twenty-three, Alice Delamar inherited the vast fortune of her mining magnate father, reportedly becoming the richest maiden of her time.She was swiftly hounded by the press, who wanted to know: Would she assume her father's famed Pembroke Estate?What would she do with all that money? And most importantly, whom would she marry?Determined to evade the public eye, Alice built sprawling, tree-covered estates, where she mixed with acclaimed figures like Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dali, Ludwig Bemelmans, George Balanchine, and Eva Le Gallienne.Behind a wall of her own making, she lived a life that hardly would have suited high society, also keeping the confidences of the