If you have a taste for celebrity biography but find more allure in the names Astor and Vanderbilt than Hilton and Weinstein, you will enjoy Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s “Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and Mother in the Gilded Age” (HarperCollins, 608 pages, $27.95). If, on the other hand, you are looking for a sensitive evocation of this milieu not drawn largely from the social headlines of contemporary newspapers, you would do better to pick up Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel “The Buccaneers,” itself based on the life of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Indeed, you would do better to pick up any Edith Wharton at all – finished or not.

What interests Mrs. Stuart, like Wharton before her, is Consuelo’s 1895 marriage (possibly forced) to the ninth Duke of Marlborough. Nicknamed “Sunny” – not for his surly personality, but because it was short for “Sunderland,” one of his many titles – the duke inherited a major aristocratic rank and a spectacular palace, Blenheim, that he lacked the funds to maintain. (The New York World reported that it cost $370,000 a year to keep up, close to $8 million today.)

To Alva, the ambitious wife of William K. Vanderbilt and granddaughter-in-law of billionaire shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, Sunny’s title made him a perfect match for her daughter, Consuelo. And the Vanderbilt fortune was, of course, a perfect match for the duke and his decaying manse. Consuelo, then 18, was less thrilled with the idea – she had already committed herself secretly to an American suitor – but her mother had the stronger will.

The accepted story, for which there is ample support, is that Alva forced Consuelo to marry the duke. In her 1952 memoir, “The Glitter and the Gold,” Consuelo said Alva imprisoned her in their Newport home, turned away her visitors, confiscated her letters, and finally threatened to have a fatal heart attack. On the morning of the wedding, Alva posted a footman at the door of the bride’s apartment to prevent a last minute escape. In 1926, when the Vatican granted Consuelo and Sunny an annulment, it did so on the basis that the marriage was coerced.

Why would Alva, who was already frustrated by her own impotence as a rich man’s wife, who divorced William K. in the same year as her daughter’s wedding, and who later became a major backer of the suffragist movement, compel Consuelo to enter a loveless marriage? And why did the intelligent and sensitive Consuelo submit? Mrs. Stuart’s desire to answer these questions is the motive behind her dual biography. Unfortunately, her ability do so is limited both by the records available – a few letters, memoirs written decades later, and newspaper gossip – and, more profoundly, by her own powers of analysis.

Both Mrs. Stuart’s narrative style and her proclivity for pat conclusions – “Consuelo’s life was much happier because, unlike Alva, she never drove away affection and love” – undermine her ability to breathe life into her characters, or to interest us in the contradictions of their lives. Her burning interests – did Alva plan her 1883 ball specifically to defeat Caroline Astor’s social ban on the Vanderbilts, or was this merely a side benefit? – tend to be more superficial.

In memoirs she began to dictate in 1917, Alva argued that by marrying Consuelo to an English aristocrat, she intended to spare her daughter the idle, circumscribed existence of an American society wife. She wanted her to have “the widest possible field for serious activity,” and not to see her culture and sense of service “dissipated in an environment that asked only frivolous amusement of a woman.” In many ways, this explanation seems retrospective and self-serving. Yet being the Duchess of Marlborough did, in the end, give Consuelo prominence and opportunities she would not have had otherwise.

Although she did not support Alva’s radical suffragist views, Consuelo made her own contributions to women’s rights and welfare, particularly after she separated from the more conservative duke. She directed a center for prisoners’ wives in a poor area of Westminster and,in 1908, wrote a series of articles on women’s social position for the North American Review. In Britain, she supported the New Liberal social reforms enacted by politicians like David Lloyd George and Sunny’s cousin, Winston Churchill.

This book’s most irksome quality is Mrs. Stuart’s star struck tone. She is, perhaps by necessity, fond of quoting from the social columns of the major 19th-century New York papers, and from magazines like Colonel D’Alton Mann’s Town Topics. Although she ventures a perfunctory critique of the “Faustian bargain between publicity and social success in Gilded Age New York,” her reliance on gossip rags means she tends to echo their breathlessness and credulity.

Unfortunately, she also takes herself more seriously than any good gossip columnist would. The result reads like Us Weekly for the over-earnest women’s studies set.

Ms. Taylor last wrote in these pages on the New Yorker cartoonists.