Sometimes we need a little romance in our lives, one with fairy-tale-like happy endings. And if they’re based on true stories, so much the better.

Shana Abé tells such a tale in “An American Beauty: A Novel of the Gilded Age,” about Arabella Huntington, a beautiful woman with a sordid past. If you’ve watched any episodes of such television series as “Downton Abbey,” “The Gilded Age” or read anything by Edith Wharton, you know how structured society was back then. Though their behaviors behind closed doors were as scandalous as any today, society would quickly ostracize anyone for the smallest infraction of the moral order of the late 1800s.

And, it was a given, if you weren’t born into the right social strata, well, then, too bad.

That’s what makes Arabella Huntington's climb to the hig

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