the great mrs elias by barbara chase riboud

Sex (!), race, gender, and class are all separate lenses, the author could have chosen to filter Elias’s story through, and any of them would have been powerful. And she rose to become one of the wealthiest Black women of her day, leveraging her earnings as a sex worker to make wise real estate investments. She was born poor, pretty and so light skinned she could (and eventually would sometimes) pass for White, in an era when Black people were figuring out how to live free in a post-Civil War America.

“There’s a temptation to think that a life like Hannah Bessie Elias’s writes itself. Elias brings a fascinating woman and the age she embodied to glorious, tragic life. Packed with glamour, suspense, and drama, populated with real-life luminaries from the period, The Great Mrs. Elias finds herself alone, ensnared in a scandalous trial, and accused of stealing her fortune from whites. Hounded by the salacious press, the very private Mrs. When the truth of her identity is uncovered, thousands of protestors gather in front of her stately home. The unsolved murder turns Hannah’s world upside-down and threatens to destroy everything she’s built. 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. As the money pours in, Hannah hides her millions across 29 banks. Hannah quietly invests in the stock market, growing her fortune with the help of businessmen. Shedding her past, Hannah slips on a new identity before relocating to New York City to become as rich as a robber baron. 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.īorn in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, Hannah Elias has done things she’s not proud of to survive.

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.Ī murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias’ glitzy, five-story, twenty-room mansion on Central Park West.

The great mrs elias by barbara chase riboud