By Nona Footz

With Audrey Clare Farley

On Sale: Oct 6, 2026
Page Count: 272 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13: 9781538772072

$30.00

$40.00 CAD

Format

Format:

Buy from Other Retailers:

For fans of Vanderbilt and The Last Castle, a riveting biography of the reclusive heiress who became a fairy godmother to twentieth-century artists while intently guarding her own secrets.

In 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 cascade of characters who came to populate her compounds—in some cases, before being dramatically cast out of paradise.

After learning of Alice in a biography of La Gallienne, Nona Footz was spellbound. Who was this woman, and what was she hiding? She spent the next decade rummaging through musty attics and traveling to far-flung cities in search of a manuscript that Alice was rumored to have left behind. What she found, especially among Alice’s surviving posse, took her breath away.

A MANSION OF HER OWN is an illuminating portrait of the mysterious millionairess, as well as an exploration of the ways that the dead push and pull the living. Tender and probing, it’s an unforgettable story about what we hide and what we seek—both from others and ourselves.

Genre:

Nona Footz is currently an executive and board recruiter and has been a freelance writer for the magazines VENU and for Art New England. In addition, Footz is an adjunct faculty member at New York University. A MANSION OF HER OWN is her first book.

Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters, which won the Michigan Notable Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Nona Footz

About the Author

Nona Footz is currently an executive and board recruiter and has been a freelance writer for the magazines VENU and for Art New England. In addition, Footz is an adjunct faculty member at New York University. A MANSION OF HER OWN is her first book.

Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters, which won the Michigan Notable Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

Learn more about this author

×

Contributors

Formats and Prices

Price