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:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“The concerts you enjoy together
Neighbors you annoy together
Children you destroy together
That make marriage a joy”
—Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930)
“Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewifes thrift, and that womans life has no other aim.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)