Marriage
Early on “Tennessee… had impetuously married a named John Bortels … but the marriage was short-lived.” When Bortels asked how she made money after disappearing for a time, it “led to a bitter quarrel, after which she agreed to give him her share of the proceeds… on the condition that he go away and divorce her.” In her late thirties she was married a second time. “Her choice was a man strikingly like Cornelius Vanderbilt—perhaps Tennie had learned a lesson by missing the chance to become the thirty-five-year-old widow of the richest man in America.”
On October 15, 1885, in England, Tennie married the vastly wealthy widower Sir Francis Cook, Viscount of Montserrat, Portugal, after telling him that the spirit of his dead wife told her she approved. “For endowing London’s Alexandra House and a concert hall for impoverished student artists,” Queen Victoria created a Cook Baronetcy. As the wife of an English baronet, Claflin would thereafter have been correctly styled “Lady Cook, Viscountess of Montserrat,” whom the British found witty and amusing. “Tennessee was still an ivory-skinned beauty with red hair and a delicate cleft chin.” When Sir Francis died sixteen years later amid rumors that she had murdered him, Tennie inherited $250,000.
Read more about this topic: Tennessee Celeste Claflin
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor’s knot.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)