A Mansion of Her Own: The Mysterious Life of Heiress Alice Delamar

For fans of Vanderbilt and The Last Castle, a riveting biography of the reclusive heiress who became a fairy godmother to twentieth-century artists while intently guarding her own secrets.

"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

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.

Author: Nona Footz
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 10/06/2026
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 8.33h x 5.83w x 0.95d
ISBN: 9781538772072


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2026 pg. 64
Booklist 08/01/2026
Publishers Weekly 08/24/2026
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2026

About the Author
Nona Footz is currently an executive and board recruiter and has been a freelance writer for the magazines VENU and for Art New England. A native of Canada, Footz is an adjunct faculty member at New York University. A MANSION OF HER OWN is her first book.

Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters, which won the Michigan Notable Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.