Mary Landon Baker (b. August 15, [1] 1901; [2] died 1961) was a rich American socialite and heiress famous for her romantic life. [3] [4] Newspapers worldwide covered her love life with Allister McCormick, whom she repeatedly left at the altar in the early 1920s. [4]
In 1926 she was briefly engaged to Bojidar Pouritch, who worked as a Yugoslav diplomat; a New York Times correspondent stated their engagement caused, "the greatest excitement since the European war". [4] [5]
Among those she rejected as possible husbands were also an English Lord, a rich Spaniard, and an Irish prince. [4] She reportedly had received 65 marriage proposals by the time she died, but never married. [6] The New York Times reported that the theater actor Barry Baxter died of a heart attack on the day that Baker broke up with him. [7]
Baker was apparently enamoured for most of her life with the British politician and writer Henry "Chips" Channon who refers to her repeatedly in his published diaries. [8]
Baker's parents were Chicago lawyer and financier Alfred L. Baker and Mary Corwith. She had an older sister, Isabelle, [2] whose married name in 1926 was Mrs. Robert M. Curtis [9] and in 1934, Mrs. Isabelle Baker Curtis Welch, and two nieces Isabelle and Priscilla. [10]
Baker lived most of her life in Chicago, and when her father passed away in 1927 she inherited a large inheritance which allowed her to remain single and live on her own, unlike many women at the time who lacked money of their own. [7]
Pride and Prejudice is an 1813 novel of manners by Jane Austen. The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.
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Nancy Jo Kassebaum Baker is an American politician who represented the State of Kansas in the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997. She is the daughter of Alf Landon, who was Governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 and the 1936 Republican nominee for president, and the widow of former Senator and diplomat Howard Baker. She was the first woman ever elected to a full term in the Senate without her husband having previously served in Congress. She is also the first woman to have represented Kansas in the Senate. Kassebaum was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1996.
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Sir Henry Channon, often known as Chips Channon, was an American-born British Conservative politician, author and diarist. Channon moved to England in 1920 and became strongly anti-American, feeling that American cultural and economic views threatened traditional European and British civilisation. He wrote extensively about these views. Channon quickly became enamoured of London society and became a social and political climber.
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Kelvedon Hall is a country house in the village of Kelvedon Hatch, near Brentwood, Essex, England. Originally the site of an important medieval manor, the current house was built in the mid-18th century by a family of Catholic landowners, the Wrights, who had bought the manor in 1538. The last of the Wrights to live at the house died in 1838 and it was then let, before being sold to a school. In 1937 the hall was bought by Henry “Chips” Channon, a wealthy Anglophile socialite. Kelvedon appears repeatedly in Channon's diaries, an intimate record of his social and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. The hall remains the private home of the Channon family. It is a Grade I listed building.