Mary Curzon

In 1870, a year before the great fire which destroyed the city, a girl called Mary Leiter was born in the suburbs of Chicago, the daughter of a self-made man. Although she died at the age of only thirty-six, she became the most famous American woman of her time. As the wife of Lord Curzon, and Vicereine of India when British power was greatest, she occupied the most splendid position which any American, man or woman, has ever held in the British Empire, and fulfilled the role with incomparable grace, courage and distinction. Mary Leiter started life with many advantages: a wealthy and loving father, great beauty, and a charm and intelligence which soon won for her many friends, like President Grover Cleveland and Henry Adams, far beyond the reach of most women of her class. She was the star of Washington and New York society before she was twenty, and then went to Paris and London, which she conquered too. She met and married, after a secret engagement lasting two years, George Nathaniel Curzon, and becme his Vicereine at the age of twenty-eight. For six years she and her husband presided over a Viceregal court of unequaled magnificence, and on her two return visits to England she became an intimate of leading members of the British Cabinet, as she had of Lord Kitchener in India. A few months after Curzon resigned under tragic circumstances, she died.