Archie and Amelie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age

Filled with glamour, mystery, and madness, Archie and Amlie is the true story chronicling a tumultuous love affair in the Gilded Age.

John Armstrong Archie Chanler was an heir to the Astor fortune, an eccentric, dashing, and handsome millionaire. Amlie Rives, Southern belle and the goddaughter of Robert E. Lee, was a daring author, a stunning temptress, and a woman ahead of her time.

Archie and Amlie seemed made for each otherboth were passionate, intense, and driven by emotionbut the very things that brought them together would soon tear them apart. Their marriage began with a secret wedding that found its way onto the front page of the New York Times, to the dismay of Archies relatives and Amlies many gentleman friends. To the world, the couple appeared charmed, rich, and famous; they moved in social circles that included Oscar Wilde, Teddy Roosevelt, and Stanford White. But although their love was undeniable, they tormented each other, and their private life was troubled from the start.

They were the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of their daya celebrated couple too dramatic and unconventional to lastbut their tumultuous story has largely been forgotten. Now, Donna M. Lucey vividly brings to life these extraordinary lovers and their sweeping, tragic romance.


In the Virginia hunt country just outside of Charlottesville, where I live, the older people still tell stories of a strange couple who died some two generations ago. The stories involve ghosts, the mysterious burning of a church, a murder at a millionaires house, a sensational lunacy trial, and a beautiful, scantily clad young woman prowling her gardens at night as if she were searching for something or someoneor trying to walk off the effects of the morphine that was deranging her. I was inclined to dismiss all of this as tall tales Virginians love to spin out; but when I looked into these yarns I found proof that they were true. . . . Donna M. Lucey on Archie and Amlie