Diamonds and Deadlines

"Prioleau brings enjoyable gusto to this biography of Mrs. Frank Leslie, a media baroness in the Gay Nineties whose past was filled with hidden drama and whose public life was awash with scandal and contradiction. But the real star of the book is Gilded Age New York in all its excess, right down to a monkey in a tux.

" --New York Times (Editors' Choice) The first major biography of the glamorous and scandalous Miriam Leslie, titan of publishing and an unsung hero of women's suffrage Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age--Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt--is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country's largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies.

A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. But Miriam Leslie was also a byword for scandal: She flouted feminine convention, took lovers, married four times, and harbored unsavory secrets that she concealed through a skein of lies and multiple personas. Both before and after her lifetime, glimpses of the truth emerged, including an illegitimate birth and a checkered youth.