Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy

Who was Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy?

Amélie Louise Rives was an American novelist and poet. Rives wrote at least twenty-four volumes of fiction, numerous uncollected poems, and Herod and Marianne, a verse drama. In 1888, she published novel The Quick or the Dead?, her most famous and popular work that sold 300,000 copies. The work depicted erotic passions of a newly widowed woman and earned Rives notoriety. Her 1914 novel, World's End was reputed to be "the best seller in New York city". Later she turned to theater and began writing plays for Broadway. Her play The Fear Market ran for 118 performances at the Booth Theatre in 1916.

A goddaughter of Robert E. Lee and a granddaughter of the engineer and senator William Cabell Rives, who had also been American ambassador to France, she was born in Richmond, Virginia and named after her aunt Amélie, a goddaughter of French Queen Marie-Amélie. Amélie Rives married eccentric John Armstrong "Archie" Chanler, eldest of ten children born to John Winthrop Chanler and Margaret Astor Ward of the Astor family. The marriage was scandalous, but unhappy. The couple spent seven years as husband and wife, but most of the time lived apart. Rives flirted with George Curzon and began using drugs. In 1896, just four months after their divorce, she married Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, an artist and aristocrat after Oscar Wilde introduced them in London. The couple resided at Castle Hill, near Cismont, Virginia.