The Wedding Veil

 By Kristy Woodson Harvey

Gallery     2022

412 pages      Historical Fiction

When I was offered a copy of The Wedding Veil by Kristy Woodson Harvey, I grabbed it immediately because the lead-up book information indicated that the book was about a family heirloom made of Belgian lace. My family has an heirloom Belgian lace wedding veil that is a family treasure, and I wanted to read about another family’s veil. Of course, our family veil never resided in the Biltmore Mansion in Ashville NC, but it is treasured none the less.

The Wedding Veil follows four women who all have a connection to a Belgian Lace veil. Two are connected to The Biltmore Mansion as members of the Vanderbilt family, and two who inherited a wedding veil  that appeared in the family under mysterious circumstances.

Edith Vanderbilt was the widow of George Vanderbilt who built the Biltmore Mansion between 1889 and 1895. After he died, Edith struggled to maintain the grounds and the community the couple developed until her daughter Cornelia Vanderbilt turned 25 and inherited the property. Cornelia was a socialite and a free spirit, who ran away from her marriage to John Cecil, never to return to the estate. (By the way, the mansion and estate remain the property of the family all these years later.) When she left, she dyed her hair pink and traveled off with her most prized possession, the Belgian wedding veil. The wedding veil then completely disappeared from the family. That’s one story.

The other story happens in the present day and concerns  an elderly woman named Babs and her granddaughter Julia. Julia ran away from her wedding, tore off the family wedding veil and escaped to the Virgin Islands, where the couple was supposed to spend their honeymoon. Her greatest supporter is her grandma Babs, who encouraged her to give up on a marriage that was destined to be a failure. Upon her return, Julia and Babs visit the Vanderbilt mansion and view an exhibition that includes a reproduction of Cornelia Vanderbilt's wedding veil. Shocked at how similar the Vanderbilt veil is to her family’s veil, Julia begins to research her family’s veil and finds that it may be the missing Vanderbilt veil.

Of course there is romance in the book--stories of enduring love and stories of failed love. This is not the kind of book that I usually read, but this one intrigued me because of the wedding veil. Harvey is a good storyteller, and the book moves along, even though there is a great deal of historical information about the Biltmore mansion. It is easy to see how the author’s curiosity was piqued by a visit to the mansion, but it is her creativity that translates the history into a delightful novel. The reviewer from the NY Journal of Books suggests that “In the end, the message is that no matter how ‘fairy-tale perfect’ our lives may appear on the surface, nothing is ever as flawless as it may seem. And that living fearlessly is always the best bet.”

Below you will find a picture of my great aunt Helma who brought our veil into the family following a trip to Bruges Belgium. Below it is a picture of Cornelia Vanderbilt in her veil.. Helma wore the veil for her wedding in 1930, and it has since been worn by ten family members. What a heritage!