Anyone intrigued by America’s Gilded Age will enjoy Jennifer Wright’s biography of Mamie Fish.

As a reader who has enjoyed both fiction and non-fiction about the people and places who shimmered in that period I was particularly interested in learning more about Mamie Fish. I knew she was a “ player” in both The Newport and Manhattan social scene, but beyond that, I was uninformed.
Jennifer Wright has brought both intelligence and a rather irreverent sense of humor to this biography. The time she writes about may have been
Stuffy and stilted, but Wright channels her subject’s irreverence for the “ customs of the country” and tells Mamie’s story as she sees it.

I am accustomed to a somewhat more formal approach to a biography, and while this writer’s style surprised me, I found it refreshing and appropriate to her subject. Mamie Fish was not likable, but she was a force to be reckoned with if you cared about where you stood in the Pecking Order of high society during the Gilded Age. It is hard to rationalize the radiantly excessive spending on wardrobe, flowers and entertaining, but it was almost parallel to a marketing expense for Elon Musk. Hard to grasp, but somehow accepted in that period of time.

One thing missing for me was language describing Mrs. Fish’s appearance. We read that she spent a fortune on her wardrobe….help me visualize what she wore. There was none of that in this book…and, my only clue as to what she looked like was my memories of her casting on the Streaming series. But maybe that is not what Mamie Fish looked like. I dont know, and the author didn’t help me envision my own Mamie.

I enjoyed the book immensely.