The Great Mrs. Elias
A Novel
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
A murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias’ glitzy, five-story, twenty-room mansion on Central Park West. 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.
Born in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, Hannah Elias has done things she’s not proud of to survive. Shedding her past, Hannah slips on a new identity before relocating to New York City to become as rich as a robber baron. Hannah quietly invests in the stock market, growing her fortune with the help of businessmen. As the money pours in, Hannah hides her millions across 29 banks. 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.
The unsolved murder turns Hannah’s world upside-down and threatens to destroy everything she’s built. When the truth of her identity is uncovered, thousands of protestors gather in front of her stately home. Hounded by the salacious press, the very private Mrs. Elias finds herself alone, ensnared in a scandalous trial, and accused of stealing her fortune from whites.
Packed with glamour, suspense, and drama, populated with real-life luminaries from the period, The Great Mrs. Elias brings a fascinating woman and the age she embodied to glorious, tragic life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chase-Riboud's revelatory if uneven saga (after Hottentot Venus) draws on the true story of Hannah Elias, a Black woman who rose from poverty in early 20th-century New York City to become a landlord and proprietor of high-class brothels. City planner Andrew Green is shot on the street in 1903. His killer, Cornelius Williams, says he did it because Green stole his sweetheart, Bessie Davis, whose identity Hannah had shed 15 years earlier. Since then, Hannah, now 38, has transformed herself. She passes as Cuban, is awash in expensive gowns, and lives in a gilded palace, thanks in part to her much older millionaire client John Rufus Platt. As the police investigate Hannah in connection with Green's killing, she relives her past as Bessie, who once rented a room to Cornelius at her boarding house. She also flashes back to her impoverished youth in Philadelphia, where she worked in a brothel and gave up her child. Back in the present, Hannah is dismissed from the murder case, but she's not out of the woods: Platt falsely charges her with blackmailing him out of $685,385. The narrative is too long and too baggy, but Platt's betrayal and the question of how the whole story fits together will keep readers holding on through the doldrums. It also offers a different perspective on a story recently covered in Jonathan Lee's otherwise more accomplished The Great Mistake. Despite the work's flaws, the author deserves credit for her vivid character portrait.
