Romaine Vinton Goddard, Baroness von Overbeck

On March 16, 1870, Goddard married Gustav von Overbeck (1830–1894), a German diplomat. Despite a winter storm, the wedding was a leading social event in Washington, with guests including US President Ulysses S. Grant. Together, they had three children:

• Baron Gustav Convers von Overbeck (b. 1871)
• Baron Oscar Karl Maria von Overbeck (b. 1873)
• Baron Alfred von Overbeck (1877–1945)

Initially the couple lived in Germany, but while Overbeck was doing business in Asia, she was left to her own devices, living in Europe or Washington, DC. She assumed the title Baroness when her husband was made a Baron in 1873, and the title maharani in 1877 when her husband was made Maharajah of Sabah, Rajah of Gaya and Sandakan by Abdul Momin, the Sultan of Brunei. Eventually they separated, but never divorced. Little is known about her husband's life in the years following the estrangement. He died at the age of 64 in London.^[1][2]

Relying financially on the income from a family trust invested in coal mines, she later lived apart from her husband in Baden-Baden and Berlin. Her children and other descendants of her grandfather Samuel Finley Vinton engaged in a decades long legal battle (Von Overbeck v. Dahlgren) over his substantial estate, which lasted from his death in 1862 until 1928.^[2]

In December 1875, she was presented by Kurd von Schlözer at a reception at the Germany embassy in Washington, DC, where she met German pianist Hans von Bülow. They began a brief, tempestuous affair and Bülow fell madly in love with her and wrote her a series of increasingly tortured love letters.^[3] The exact nature of their relationship is unknown as only his letters to her are known to exist, and not any responses she may have written. Her mother's novel A Washington Winter (1893) contains a sub-plot which was likely inspired by Bülow’s pursuit of Goddard.^[1][4]

• Madame Von Overbeck by George Peter Alexander Healy, 1876