I really enjoyed reading this book and found it to be a very fast read. I was interested in it because I watched the BBC dramatization - which was heavily Americanized & modernized as it turns out. My chief exposure to Edith Wharton was the very short and quite depressing "Ethan Frome." I found that to be written in quite an impenetrable style and was turned off of her for years - until I saw the film and came across a copy of the book in a used bookstore.

The way she writes in "The Buccaneers" is really fantastic - she manages to show things from the perspectives of different characters - even going into the point of view of a particular character for an entire chapter. Sadly, she died before she finished this and another author finished off the book based on her notes.

I much prefer the book to the film because it is really of a cloth with the way Edith Wharton talks about the values and interactions of these social classes. I even found it interesting how she referenced changing clothing styles (I could hear the old ladies saying "young girls these days!! pantalettes? oh dear!").

Her character development was really fantastic - I got a very clear sense of who these people were and their motivations, how they spoke and behaved. Such a better story than what the film presented!

The last and unfinished novel, by one of our greatest female writers, Edith Wharton. It was finished by a Wharton scholar, Ms. Mainwearing, and she did an exceptional job. In this her last novel, Edith wrote about the nouveau rich in the NYC of the 1880's, and their struggle to fit in with the older, rich families. Edith Wharton belonged to one of the oldest, elite families in NYC, and she wrote about what she knew best, her own class and their prejudice and snobbery (which she detested). This book is so good, it's like eating a box of Godiva chocolates. Also made into a PBS movie, which is also worth watching.

This might be an odd start to Wharton, but the subject matter intrigued me after having read a non-fiction book about the very phenomenon Wharton talks of here (American heiresses who, finding no entrance into the very rigid New York social scene, instead invaded the British aristocracy). The Buccaneers is unfinished, but Wharton reads like a Victorian Austen, fully as knowing about human nature, and almost as ready to take the piss out of everybody though not quite. I really enjoyed it and it is a great shame it was never finished. However, there's plenty more where that came from so I have something to look forward to at least.

I couldn’t help but shake my head at the young debutantes that this novel was centered around and wonder at their choices.

This is hard to rate for me. I’m winding up at 4 stars because 3 seems a bit too harsh.

I really loved the first half or so of this. All the relationships and seeing England through the eyes of these American girls. How all the prejudices can be so different depending on the people… Once Nan got married though it’s like it screeched to a halt. I get that she’s bored and unhappy, but I don’t want to be. The end picked up and, for the most part, I think Mainwaring did a good job at finishing the book.

After reading The House of Mirth I was so depressed that I promised myself I'd never read another book by Edith Wharton, but this one turned out differently (thank god) and I couldn't put it down.

more soon but for now, it was a solidly good read.

Very tedious reading for me, unlike other stories by this author.

The content of The Buccaneers could well and wholly be summed up by the French proverb "L'argent ne fait pas le bonheur." Neither do the titles of nobility and everything that goes with it.
Wharton's choice of theme for this novel is twofold. First, it shows the collision of two civilisations, where the world of the blase British nobility, considered by itself to be the pinnacle of the excellence, is invaded by the American parvenus. This would be of no importance if the American intruders weren't "filthy rich" and the Brits weren't in desperate need of money to maintain their out-of-date Ancien Regime style of living.
The second theme Wharton addresses is the social position of the married women. Being completely dependent on a husband and his (good??) will, women were seen almost as a personal property of men. Their fate was not to be envied. Their reputation could be ruined with a few well-chosen words that were admitted to and valid in the court of law. Caught in mariages de convenance, they either had to settle down for a loveless and dull life or they could break away. Freedom, however, had to be paid dearly, and so it is understandable why most women chose the former "solution".
Edith Wharton, being herself part of the high society, excells in showing the fate of the married American "buccaneers" in the British society. In the part of the novel written by her, humour, dry witticism and irony blend into a mixture so familiar from her other works. It's only too bad that the same cannot be said about the concluding part, written by M. Mainwaring!!!!!

Mainwaring isn’t a particularly convincing mimic, and overall the story feels like something of an apologia for the tribulations of Lily Bart, but the Wharton sections are crisply scathing. I enjoyed it but non-completists don’t need to bother.

Books like this are so very difficult to review. I felt so deeply for Nan and I could understand how she felt and what she thought. Indeed, I could relate to her very well as her thinking process is similiar to mine.

My problem with the book is that in the end she makes a choice. When you read it it seems like a good choice. You want her to live and love. You want her to live happily ever after, to be with the man that she is passionately in love with.

And in most stories that would be wonderful. But in this story there is a slight problem.

She's already married.

The writing style is engaging, the plot is well-developed and fascinating (I finished it in two days.), and you love some characters and hate others. But somehow at the end of the book, despite being relieved that she will live happily ever after, you feel a slight tinge of guilt associated with that relief.

I hate reading books like this because I'm a romantic at heart and deep down inside I know that if I finished the book and she didn't end up with the man that she loved I would be furious. I love books where the girl and the guy come together in the end. When they're in love and live happily ever after. That's why books like this are so difficult for me...because sometimes what's right isn't what's "romantic". And I want love to prevail in the end.

Nan did what was right "romantically" but did she do the right thing "morally"?

Questions like that are bound to surface after finishing Edith Wharton's "The Buccaneers."

The synopsis for this 1938 edition for The Buccaneers (appearing above) is completely wrong! Who wrote that?! No swashbuckling pirates, here! Edith Wharton's "novel" was published as a lightly edited, incomplete manuscript in the year following her death. It was sure to have been her masterpiece!
The "Buccaneers" are 5 nouveau riche American girls who, steered by an English-Italian (cousin to artist/poet D.G. Rosetti) governess, "invade" the Bristish peerage in the 'seventies (1870's).
While later editions append with an ending written by a Wharton scholar, I am charmed that my local libray is still circulating this original 1938 edition! There is no ending; it's a cliffhanger prematurely left off amidst a failing marriage and budding romance. So why 5 stars??
The writing is superb. The British landscape is beautifully elaborated, in watercolor tones. The subject is fascinating: courtships spanning the improbable social/cultural divide between American upstarts and British aristocrats. And then there's the novelty of reading an unfinished work. The editor insists that Ms. Wharton was not finished developing several of her characters. The contrast between her well-developed characters and the more-transparent ones helps a modern reader appreciate qualities of "classic" literature. I universally recommend this forgotten masterpiece. I'm still deciding if I'll read the "finished" edition, as this one was surprisingly satisfying even in it's incompletion.

This book was surprisingly meh for me!! I expected to love it but it felt rather disjointed (it was in fact a manuscript completed by another author following Edith Wharton’s death) and I didn’t love the characters.