Marion Mainwaring did an admirable job completing this unfinished Wharton tale, although I’ll always wonder how Wharton might have twisted it still more herself. It’s a tale of young beauties, ostracized by New York high society as “new money”, visiting London and taking the town by storm, and all the complications that arrive thereafter. The old prejudices, the allure of the new & fresh, and the clash of cultures all mix for a splendid novel.

Nan is everything I want to be: a romantic, honest, adventurous, and humble. How brave of her in this book, and how idyllic to lead with love instead of status. I loved the acknowledgment of the “beyond” as a means of the separation of deeper spirits from those on the surface level.

It’s so Wharton-esque to condemn societal expectations if they result in feelings of disdain, jealousy, unhappiness, and artifice. She writes wonderfully, but I would have liked this one to be a short story instead. It was predictable, and it was taking too long to get to where we knew it would end.

I can’t wait to watch the show!

Edit: the show was VASTLY different from the book, but I honestly loved it so much. I usually hate when things stray from the text, but it was SO GOOD!

See discussion in the Reading for Pleasure group/Buddy Reads/July 2016

An unfinished work finished with class.

I was wondering how this unfinished novel of Wharton would read with a modern writer taking up the task & I was pleased with it but kept wondering how Edith would have ended it. I loved this story & found the governess a memorable character not soon to be forgotten. The Buccaneers is an unfinished work by Edith Wharton (1862-1937) which was published as that in 1938 by her publisher. That version is not at this time available on Kindle but I would be interested in knowing how many changes were made until the XXIX. Wharton had written 89,000 words & the rest was finished by a Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring in 1993 & soon after a TV mini series was produced from this book. I noticed a different ending feel than the past Wharton novels I have read but I have not read them all yet. I was very happy with this ending but due to the controversy from many who thought Wharton would have ended it differently. In 1995, Angela Mackworth- Young finished it with a different ending, and this is not available on Kindle either. Wharton wanted to write a book about the Gilded age of marriages between wealthy American heiresses & English nobility which at that time labeled as Buccaneers. In New York society many of the young girls were in a group labeled The Buccaneers. There are resemblances to Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Randolph Churchill & Consuelo Montagu, Duchess of Manchester. I had heard that Winston Churchill had ties to America but it was interesting to find out that his mother was born in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn -Jeanette Jerome -aka - Lady Randolph Churchill. The story tells of the match making, marrying for title & money. The differences in American & English women of the time & of both societies.The story tells of five girls & their mothers after having no success in finding husbands for their daughters in high society & lacking invitations to higher events given by more prominent families decide to do a "London season". In hope they might have better luck. Virginia, Lizzy, Mabel & Nan visit a American friend, Conchita recently wed to a nobelman. Excerpts- "Ushant must have two sons- three, if possible. But his wife doesn't seem to understand her duties. Yet she has only to look into the prayer-book ...But I've never been able to find out to what denomination her family belongs.""The greatest mistake," she mused, her chin resting on her clasped hands, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the dim reaches of the park, "the greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience'.

I didn’t listen to the version with a “completed” ending - so I only got as far as Wharton did, with only her plot outline to guide us for where we might go next. I like to think that if Wharton had completed the book, she would have gone back and revised her draft to make it tighter and less pedestrian. But as it is, we get a lot of characters but a shortage of the searing insight into human foibles (especially those touching on class, marriage and propriety) and lapidary writing that characterizes Wharton’s finished novels. None of the humor and sarcasm of custom of the country, none of the heart break of House of mirth. As I said, I’d like to believe she would’ve fixed all that in revisions.

As it is, I’d still rather listen to this than someone else’s adaptation. But not entirely satisfying for even a passionate Wharton fan.

The Buccaneers is Edith Wharton’s last and uncompleted novel. She had written approximately 89,000 words before her death and the novel was printed in its incomplete form by her publisher. In 1993 Marion Mainwaring, a noted Wharton scholar, completed the story, in line with notes that Wharton had left behind. She did a good job, since there is no obvious break in the voice between the beginning of the book and the end, but it seems clear to me that no one, even a great scholar, could ever know exactly how Wharton would have ended her work. If someone was going to guess, I think Mainwaring was a good choice, but I can’t help wishing Wharton could have done it herself and that it were as pure a Wharton as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.

Despite this, The Buccaneers is a masterful work of fiction, set in Wharton’s high-society world, and full of the angst and manipulation that makes me happy for just a moment not to have been among the fabulously wealthy, well-married women of the time. Love and marriage do not go together like a horse and carriage in Wharton’s world. Marriage is mostly an institution of convenience and profit, you get a name and I get money, and woe to the romantically inclined girl who stumbles into this world of harsh reality unawares.

It is the reality behind the mask in a Wharton that makes it so worthwhile to read her. She strips the conventions to the bone and calls them by name. She exposes what people are willing to do and become in an effort to climb a social ladder, where someone else is always contriving to knock them off or at least kick them down a rung. And, she is superbly adept at lending light to the less affluent who have to circle in this world and navigate its waters. One of her finest characters in The Buccaneers is Miss Laura Testvalley, a governess who knows her place and sees the world without any rose-colored glasses, but whose caring heart cannot resist loving and aiding her charge, Annabel St. George (Nan).

There is always the beauty of Wharton’s descriptive writing that would, alone, make me wish to read this book: It was dark when Folyat House loomed high and stately in Portman Square, light shining from its long rows of windows and torches flaming at the grand portal. Footmen jumped down from the barouche which had met the travelers at Paddington, opened the escutcheoned doors, and helped them out. Other footmen led them up steps and into an oval colonnaded lobby. The Glenloe girls’ eyes widened as the groom-of-the-chambers, attended by yet other footmen, conducted them into a great rectangular hall through an arch at the opposite end.” When I read that,I feel I am one of the Glenloe girls and can see the glamour of the hall and the bustle of the footmen providing their services to the titled and privileged in a stoic and efficient manner.

I loved seeing the five girls (who are the buccaneers) transform from innocent pawns in the game to active players. In the beginning, they are primarily spurred on by ambitious mothers, while they are, themselves, just happy to have a good time and attract the attention of the men. By the end, they are among the ones pulling the strings and conniving for power, and the wheat is separated from the chaff, as they say.

They change, even toward one another. “Virginia, who had seemed to Annabel so secure, so aloof, so disdainful of everything but her own pleasures, but who, as Lady Seadown, was enslaved to that dull half-sleeping Seadown, absorbed in questions of rank and precedence, and in awe--actually in awe--of her father-in-law’s stupid arrogance…”

Finally, they are seen, even by their husbands as pirates, conquerors, rulers who come to rule by stealth:
”What a gang of buccaneers you are!” he breathed to his wife.
t“Buccaneers,” Lizzy reminded him gently, “were not notorious for paying fortunes for what they took.”

Several of these girls do pay heavily for what they take, and they pay more than money. Those who fail to toe society’s line pay a price and lose a lot, but those who adhere to it pay almost as much, if not more. Wharton does not traffic in happily ever after in her novels--people die, they are ruined, they are impoverished. I personally see the hand of Mainwaring in this novel most heavily in the lightness of the penalties exacted. I believe Wharton would have visited a harsher punishment on her characters in the end. She was unflinching when portraying the viciousness of society. She had seen it in her lifetime. She knew the costs. You need only think of Lily Bart to know that she did. I can’t help wondering, had fate allowed Wharton to finish this novel, if my dear Nan and Laura Testvalley would have been spared.

Edith Wharton’s parts (about three-quarters) were 5 stars.

This show is great. This book is not

I think this is Wharton's weakest work and I firmly believe she would have repaired the problems contained here. The plot is predictable from early on and the characters are altogether unlovable and uninteresting. I haven't read the unaltered manuscript, but the conclusion feels too modern.

This was a fascinating look at the effects of British lords marrying rich Americans to finance their crumbling estates (as in Downtown Abbey). The American ladies chafe at the bit of British rules, and their love stories seem doomed from the start. However, this is more a tale of sisterhood than romance, and the sharp characterization reminded me of why I love Wharton so much. Like Virginia Woolf, she wrote with a feminist slant and dared to raise subjects few female authors of her time would take on.

New Apple TV + series…maybe it’s good?

Valutazione 4,5
Ero molto curiosa di leggere questo romanzo incompiuto della Wharton e devo dire che non mi ha deluso. Certo lo stile narrativo è un po’ meno sofisticato del solito ma la storia è ben costruita, malgrado qualche salto temporale di troppo e, sicuramente, alcuni personaggi mancano un po' di approfondimento però, malgrado qualche difetto qua e là, mi sono ritrovata coinvolta nelle vicende di queste cinque ragazze americane che, reiette socialmente, perché parvenue nella loro Patria, vanno in cerca di un riscatto sociale nella vecchia e polverosa Inghilterra e grazie ad un personaggio incisivo e insolito come Laura Testvalley (vero nome Testavaglia, discendente di patrioti del Risorgimento e cugina del pittore e poeta preraffaellitavero Dante Gabriel Rossetti che, nel romanzo, ha un ruolo minore ma di una certa importanza) vero deux ex machina della situazione, riescono con successo nel loro intento seppur con destini diversi...
Ed è proprio attraverso la figura della governante Laura Testvalley che l’autrice disvela il cinismo e i pregiudizi americani e l’ipocrisia al di qua dell’Oceano Atlantico. Due mondi, due culture, due modi di pensare completamente diversi che conosceva molto bene e non aveva alcun scrupolo di denunciare...
Accanto a Laura la figura di Nan, la più sognatrice, vera ed idealista delle ragazze che, inconsapevole del suo fascino, colpirà con la sua spontaneità e profondità d’animo, due uomini completamente diversi e, alla fine, troverà la forza di fare una scelta coraggiosa e romantica dopo aver raggiunto l’apice del successo sociale ma anche dell’infelicità…