If anyone considered an army wife to be merely the kite’s tail, Beatrice Ayer Patton had the perfect retort, “How high can a kite soar without its tail?”

Synopsis

395 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston is not just the only Tiffany-designed home in the world but also where an insecure, twenty-three-year-old George Patton declared his love to Beatrice Ayer. Her father—textile and patent medicine industrialist Frederick Ayer—liked the man but not so much the soldier and tried everything in his power to make him change careers. The West Point Cadet, however, was as hellbent on becoming a great battlefield commander as his sweetheart was on becoming his wife. He made a perfect choice because, as Lady of the Army shows, George Patton never would have reached the heights he did without her.

Reviews

“A masterpiece of seminal research, Lady of the Army is an extraordinary, detailed, and unique biography of a remarkable woman married to a now legendary American military leader in both World War I and World War II.”

—Midwest Book Review

“A magisterial recounting of the life of George S. Patton’s wife Beatrice, Stefanie van Steelandt’s Lady of the Army offers a frank and sympathetic portrait of the woman behind the general.” 

—Craig Jones, for IndieReader

Author

An independent scholar who spent the last twenty years studying biography, Stefanie Van Steelandt grew up near Belgium’s Liberty Road, which General Patton and his Third Army followed during WWII. Currently living in New York City and working on her second book, Ms. Van Steelandt spent nearly four years researching and writing Lady of the Army.