Gail MacColl

Gail MacColl is a writer and social historian whose best-known book examines the transatlantic marriages that linked wealthy American families with the British aristocracy. She wrote To Marry an English Lord or, How Anglomania Really Got Started with Carol McD. Wallace. Workman first published their extensively illustrated account in 1989, and the book later returned in a 2012 edition. MacColl and Wallace follow the American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explaining the social ambitions, money, family strategies, and cultural misunderstandings behind their marriages to titled Englishmen. Photographs, drawings, family trees, quotations, and period details give the history the pace and texture of a society album. The authors also distinguish the glamour attached to these matches from the practical pressures faced by the women involved. To Marry an English Lord or, How Anglomania Really Got Started remains MacColl's defining contribution, combining accessible narrative history with a carefully designed visual record of the era.