A Mansion of Her Own
The Mysterious Life of Heiress Alice DeLamar
Contributors
By Nona Footz
With Audrey Clare Farley
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Oct 6, 2026
- Page Count
- 352 pages
- Publisher
- Grand Central Publishing
- ISBN-13
- 9781538772096
Price
$15.99Price
$20.99 CADFormat
Format:
- ebook $15.99 $20.99 CAD
- Hardcover $32.50 $42.00 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99
Preorder from Retailers:
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.
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“Nona Footz’s A Mansion of Her Own is simply marvelous. Deftly combining three genres – biography, mystery, and autobiography – Footz introduces us to the unforgettable heiress and art benefactor Alice DeLamar; discloses in tantalizing nuggets DeLamar’s many buried secrets; and wrestles with her own conclusions as she struggles to pry those secrets away from Alice’s mischievous friends. All of that would be satisfying enough, but Footz gives us more. Her book is also a journey through the bedrooms and drawing rooms of the twentieth-century art world where luminaries expressed forbidden sexual desires and found inspiration for much of the art they created. The book is so good, I picked it up and barely breathed until I was finished.”Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women
