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Summary
Summary
The author of the award-winning Sally Hemings now brings to life Hannah Elias, one of the richest black women in America in the early 1900s, in this mesmerizing novel swirling with atmosphere and steeped in history.
A murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias' glitzy, five-story, twenty-room mansion on Central Park West. This is the beginning of an odyssey that moves back and forth in time and reveals the dangerous secrets of a mysterious woman, the fortune she built, and her precipitous fall.
Born in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, Hannah Elias has done things she's not proud of to survive. Shedding her past, Hannah slips on a new identity before relocating to New York City to become as rich as a robber baron. Hannah quietly invests in the stock market, growing her fortune with the help of businessmen. As the money pours in, Hannah hides her millions across 29 banks. Finally attaining the life she's always dreamed, she buys a mansion on the Upper West Side and decorates it in gold and first-rate décor, inspired by her idol Cleopatra.
The unsolved murder turns Hannah's world upside-down and threatens to destroy everything she's built. When the truth of her identity is uncovered, thousands of protestors gather in front of her stately home. Hounded by the salacious press, the very private Mrs. Elias finds herself alone, ensnared in a scandalous trial, and accused of stealing her fortune from whites.
Packed with glamour, suspense, and drama, populated with real-life luminaries from the period, The Great Mrs. Elias brings a fascinating woman and the age she embodied to glorious, tragic life.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Chase-Riboud's revelatory if uneven saga (after Hottentot Venus) draws on the true story of Hannah Elias, a Black woman who rose from poverty in early 20th-century New York City to become a landlord and proprietor of high-class brothels. City planner Andrew Green is shot on the street in 1903. His killer, Cornelius Williams, says he did it because Green stole his sweetheart, Bessie Davis, whose identity Hannah had shed 15 years earlier. Since then, Hannah, now 38, has transformed herself. She passes as Cuban, is awash in expensive gowns, and lives in a gilded palace, thanks in part to her much older millionaire client John Rufus Platt. As the police investigate Hannah in connection with Green's killing, she relives her past as Bessie, who once rented a room to Cornelius at her boarding house. She also flashes back to her impoverished youth in Philadelphia, where she worked in a brothel and gave up her child. Back in the present, Hannah is dismissed from the murder case, but she's not out of the woods: Platt falsely charges her with blackmailing him out of $685,385. The narrative is too long and too baggy, but Platt's betrayal and the question of how the whole story fits together will keep readers holding on through the doldrums. It also offers a different perspective on a story recently covered in Jonathan Lee's otherwise more accomplished The Great Mistake. Despite the work's flaws, the author deserves credit for her vivid character portrait. (Feb.)
Kirkus Review
The story of a Black woman who became a millionaire a century ago. This completes the author's quintet of historical novels about what she calls "invisible" women of color whose significant stories have been erased. Hannah Elias certainly has a significant story. She was born Bessie Davis in 1865 to a struggling family in Philadelphia. In this fictional version of her life she was raped as a child, unjustly imprisoned for theft as a teen, and cast out by her family. She became a sex worker to survive and soon moved up to running bordellos. Moving to New York City, she cultivated upper-class admirers, a goal made easier by her ability to easily pass as White, and parlayed her success into a real estate empire. By the time she was in her 30s she was one of the richest Black people in the country but little known--she was careful to avoid scandal. That all blew up, however, when Cornelius Williams, who had been a tenant in one of her boardinghouses and suffered the delusion that they were lovers, shot and wounded Hannah at her mansion on Central Park West and shot to death city planner Andrew Green, known as the "Father of Greater New York" for his role in founding Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other landmarks. His death was an error: Williams mistook him for one of Hannah's longtime millionaire lovers John Platt. But the murder, which opens the book, exposed the relationship between Hannah and Platt as well as Hannah's wealth, leading to tabloid headlines and blackmail accusations that shook New York City's upper crust. It's a compelling story, based on what Chase-Riboud says in the acknowledgements is a long-lost trove of documents about Elias. But the novel, especially in its first half, slows the story down with prose that is often clunky and overladen with details, dialogue that sounds more like lecture than conversation, and much repetition. The last part of the book does build momentum, if the reader gets there. A novel about a real-life madam-turned--real estate magnate stumbles on style. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The real-life Hannah Elias story is so outlandishly convoluted one struggles to accept it as anything but fiction. Chase-Riboud introduces her imagined version of the rags-to-riches madame sipping champagne in her gilded bordello, impervious to her stern, morally upright daughter and scores of jilted lovers at her bejeweled feet. Haven't we seen this before? Yet Chase-Riboud elevates this tale with a sobering look at Black female exploitation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Starting out as Bessie, the future wealthy entrepreneur is sexually assaulted at age 11, sexually harassed and unjustly accused of theft at 20, and disowned by her family after landing in jail. Her eventual rebirth as a mysteriously beautiful and wealthy "Cuban" businesswoman is not merely a personal triumph but one for her race as well. While her white lover opines that, "Negroes are the only people in which there is no reinvention, because their only identity is there on that black skin--they can change their names, become millionaires, invent the goddamn wheel, and they're still only one thing: a Negro," Hannah's success blazes in mocking rebuke. Peppered with such historical figures as Lillian Russell, Granville Woods, and J. P. Morgan, and enlivened with a showstopping courtroom debacle, Chase-Riboud's biographical novel is a randy, rollicking tour of Gilded Age excess, racism, and misogyny.
Library Journal Review
In early 1900s New York, light-skinned Hannah Elias passes for southern European, brilliantly invests the alimony she receives after divorcing her white husband, and ends up with a fortune and an Upper West Side mansion. Then the police barge in with questions after one of Hannah's old lovers is murdered. Celebrated sculptor/novelist/poet Chase-Riboud reimagines the life of one of America's richest Black women; with a 60,000-copy first printing.
