Photo credit: Janet Donovan
Ok, so let’s get to the good part: Gossip!
Tennessee Celeste Claflin – a.k.a Tennie – was an American suffragist, broker, and rumored mistress of Cornelius Vanderbilt, best known as one of the first women to open a Wall Street brokerage firm with her sister Victoria Woodhull. During the 1870s she was a flamboyant proponent of women’s rights and ran for Congress in New York. She also held the controversial belief that women could serve in the military. She Later became Lady Cook, Viscountess of Montserrat……..which takes us to Sintra, Portugal – a brief ride from Lisbon via winding roads and lush greenery and to the life and times of The Scarlet Sisters.
The Scarlet Sisters, by award-winning author Myra MacPherson, deconstructs and lays bare the manners and mores of Victorian America, remarkably illuminating the struggle for equality that women are still fighting today. “Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee ‘Tennie’ Claflin – the most fascinating and scandalous sisters in American history – were unequaled for their vastly avant-garde crusade for women’s fiscal, political, and sexual independence. They escaped a tawdry childhood to become rich and famous, achieving a stunning list of firsts. Amid high gossip that Vanderbilt was Tennie’s lover, the richest man in America, fabled tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, bankrolled the sisters. As beautiful as they were audacious, the sisters drew a crowd of more than two thousand Wall Street bankers on opening day. A half century before women could vote, Victoria used her Wall Street fame to become the first woman to run for president, choosing former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate. She was also the first woman to address a United States congressional committee. Tennie ran for Congress and shocked the world by becoming the honorary colonel of a black regiment.” Book Notes.
The two sisters eventually fled to London among scandal (of course) and married two of the richest men in England, dining with royalty while pushing for women’s rights well into the twentieth century: A ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going’ kind of thing. Hollywood on the Potomac was in Sintra with MacPherson who introduced us to Gerald Luckhurst.
Luckhurst is a landscape architect living and working in Portugal for the last twenty five years. His latest book The Gardens of Madeira was published November 2010. Currently he is working on Monserrate, an historic landscape garden in Sintra, and a number of landscape design projects for international hotels at the castle. MacPherson and he met while she was researching The Scarlet Sisters.
Myra MacPherson and Gerald Luckhurst
A look around:
