Half way through and I can't listen to this story any longer. It is so, so boring.

The Buccaneers proved to be an interesting bookend for the career of Edith Wharton.

Wharton had completed about two-thirds of The Buccaneers when she died in 1937. For decades, it appeared in “unfinished” form. But in the early ‘90s, Wharton expert Marion Mainwaring completed the book, based on Wharton’s own high level synopsis.

The Buccaneers proved to be an apt companion piece to Wharton’s most famous novel, The Age of Innocence. Set in the same time period, it focused on a group of “new money” girls who found themselves denied entry to the upper reaches of New York society. Instead, they crossed the Atlantic, where London found their brash charms a breath of fresh air. Marriage to a variety of nobles ensued.

Wharton’s idea was fairly genius. Dramatizing how a group kept out of “old” society in one country prospered by being the new blood that an even older social set in another cried out for provided an interesting extrapolation of themes the writer had explored in numerous of her works. The Buccaneers still was a drama of manners. The Americans faced differing levels of success in navigating the labyrinth of customs and expectations of Upper Class Brits. But unlike other novels where the newcomers were kept out, here they succeeded brilliantly. Fans of Downton Abbey may recognize the concept of a rich American becoming the wife of a British noble.

At its core, The Buccaneers was about the complicated romance of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte. A brief encounter established a seed of sympathy between the duo. But Guy was obliged to go abroad and make the money needed to keep his family’s estate afloat. Nan entered an ill-advised marriage to a colorless Duke who couldn’t appreciate her unique sensibilities. The feelings that spark between Nan and Guy when they re-enter one another’s lives drive the drama of the final act.

In many ways, The Buccaneers is atypical of Wharton’s plots. For one, the star-crossed couple got that rarest of Wharton rewards: a happy ending. The duo transcended the blight on their reputations and ran off together. Prior Wharton heroines had only a life or regret and loss (or, occasionally, poverty-stricken death) as reward for their impulsive actions and questionable decisions. Nan got to be with the man she loved, even if the scandal produced would blow back on her family.

Nan also had something few Wharton heroines had: a sympathetic friend and advisor who cared more about Nan’s happiness than bowing to propriety. Nan’s governess, Laura Tetsvalley (daughter of an expat Italian family), filled the maternal role for Nan more capably than Nan’s own fairly useless mother. Laura made mistakes of her own along the way, but eventually elected to bear the brunt of Nan’s scandal on her own shoulders, allowing her former pupil to escape a life that made her unhappy.

The Buccaneers also is notable for how sympathetic its putative villains are. Ushant, the colorless Duke, set a lot of the unhappiness in motion. He married Nan not because he particularly valued her, but because he found her ignorance of his station appealing and thought he could mold her into an ideal wife. While that doesn’t value Nan’s virtues, it’s also not exactly hissable. The Duke was a product of his upbringing and only wanted his wife to learn her role and help perpetuate his line. But the story made clear that, while not warm, he wasn’t a bad person. The rules of British society at the time gave him the right to force his will on Nan, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that. Given that his wife left him after telling him she was in love with someone else, the fact that he tried to end the union in as quiet a manner as possible is rather commendable.

The Dowager Duchess was also a source of antagonism for Nan. But the writing does a good job of demonstrating that she was motivated by her sense of duty, to her son, his position and their family. You may not like her, but she’s understandable. Even a spoiled noblewoman who launched an unfounded scandal about Nan out of a fit of pique was more pathetic than evil.

Some of those differences might be attributed to Mainwaring. And yet she channels Wharton’s style almost seamlessly. And the plot developments were based on Wharton’s own plans for The Buccaneers. Mainwaring blends into Wharton’s work quite well. A reader could believe the finished book is the product of one voice.

For fans of Wharton’s more famous books, The Buccaneers is a thematic variation worth checking out.

A version of this review originally appeared on www.thunderalleybcp.com

ville også forlade min mand, hvis han var skuffet over at jeg ikke var ligeså simpel som et ur

Were it not for the COVID-19 quarantine closing all public libraries in our state, I probably would have returned this book without finishing it. I can't say it was a struggle to read, but the only reason I found myself picking it up was in times of total boredom. Many reviewers have been critical of Marion Mainwaring's completion of the book, but what she contributed to finish it was far more succinct than the pages that Edith Wharton wrote.

Edith Wharton's last novel (sadly incomplete) is full of wittily observed adventures by a group of loveable American heiresses in the 1800s. I responded warmly to all of the characters and loved the story's sense of fun which pervades right up to Wharton's last pages. This version of the book has been completed by another writer. This second section of the book was a bit too different to Wharton's prose for my liking and I didn't bother reading it. I preferred to let my own imagination finish off the story.

this copy is not original nor is it printed by the publisher described in the description

Beautiful! I couldn't  put it down.

Edith Wharton è una delle mie scrittrici preferite e da questo suo ultimo libro, ultimato da un'allieva dopo la sua morte, è stato tratto uno dei film che preferisco in assoluto, un vero capolavoro della BBC. Chi come me ha amato il film apprezzerà quindi anche il libro che l'ha ispirato.

The Buccanners by Edith Wharton has been said to be based on the marriage of Consuela Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborogh.  The only resemblence that I could see is that Consuelo married a duke and later divorced him, and the central figure in this book also married a duke.  Nan St. George is the 18 year old American who marries the English duke.  She is always in the shadow of her older beautiful sister and just drifts into a marriage and then drifts out of it.  She is short and not too bright.  Consuelo was tall, 5ft 8 inches, well educated, elegant and forceful.  She was only 18 when she married the duke and made a tremendous effort to assume the duties of a duchess.  Nan St. George prefered to remain child
like and drifted in to a romance with another man and wanted to go to the Greece of Byron and Rossetti.  She lacked common sense and education. She was still clinging to her governess long after she was a wife and pregnant.  The book constantly describes her as young and small.  She had the brain and mind of a grammar school child.  Edith Wharton lived in the social circles depicted in this book.

Loved this author's writing style and vocabulary.  Follows the movie until the last segments when the author had actually died and there was another one to complete her original work.  So story endings vary from movie to text.  Really enjoyed the read.

Movies often don't do justice to the original material and I believe this is true for The Buccaneers. After seeing the movie I was a bit wary about reading the book, but I'm glad I took the chance and hope this review encourages others to do the same.

The story concerns five American heiresses – Conchita Closson; Virginia and Annabel "Nan" St. George; and Lizzie and Mabel Elmsworth – who are unable to gain entrée into the upper echelons of American society because their families' wealth comes from "new money." So the girls are introduced into English society with the assistance of Conchita, who has married the younger son of a marquess, and their governess, Miss Testvalley, whose previous posts included some of the noble families now on the girls' radar.

The Buccaneers was only about 2/3 complete when Edith Wharton died in 1937, and though her notes were not extensive they did include a synopsis of the main story lines. Marion Mainwaring completed Wharton's book in the 1990s, around the same time that the movie was being made. Both achieved the end result that Wharton intended but Mainwaring's version is superior in every way, building as she did on the foundation Wharton had laid without subordinating or supplanting it.

***SPOILERS***

Though the basic framework of the movie and the book are the same, the movie introduced several significant deviations that not only detracted from the story Wharton was trying to tell but turned it into soap opera fodder, i.e., Wharton never said or suggested that the Duke was sexually attracted to men, or that he consummated the marriage by raping Nan; the reason Conchita needed money was to pay off her and her husband's debts, not to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and her husband did not have a venereal disease; and Guy never actually occupied a political perch from which to give revolutionary speeches. Nan left the Duke in both renditions but the movie's handling of this event was painfully anachronistic whereas Mainwaring's depiction fits more credibly with the place, the time and the characters that Wharton described.

In both book and movie Nan is the heroine of the piece, an endearing character whose romantic nature has been nurtured by her governess, mentor and friend, Miss Testvalley. The book effectively conveys why this was such a recipe for disaster: meeting the Duke among the "magical" ruins of his Cornish castle, Tintagel, Nan imbued him with qualities he simply did not possess. He was not a bad man, just so rigidly traditional and unimaginative that he didn't know how to function outside of strict order and ritual. Even his restoration of Tintagel lacked any hint of romanticism or whimsy - he considered it a "costly folly" that he was obligated to finish only because it had been started by his father.

The Duke fell in love with Nan (as much as he was capable) because of her "childish innocence, her indifference to money and honours", but he never gave a single thought to how stifling the rigid rules, the pomp and ceremony of life as he and his family lived it, were to the very qualities in Nan that first attracted him. She was simply expected to adapt. And she might well have done so in a less stagnant, emotionally stifling setting, such as the vastly different environment she later found at Lady Glenloe's home. But the Duke and his mother, the Dowager Duchess, had been firmly inculcated in the supremacy of tradition ("It has always been like that"), and they were as intolerant of the smallest suggestion of change as they were of Nan's "asking the reason of things that have nothing to do with reasons." So, for example, Nan was surprised by the radiant Correggio paintings ("those happy pagans") hanging on the walls of her boudoir, a room previously occupied by the Dowager Duchess, until she realized the Dowager would have considered displacing the paintings to be the more subversive act.

Mainwaring picks up Wharton's thread at the point where Nan is on an extended visit to the Glenloe family. Miss Testvalley is now employed there, and Guy and his father are near neighbors and regular visitors. Guy had recently agreed to become the Duke's candidate for the House of Commons but he knows this is impossible once he realizes he's in love with Nan and how unhappily married she is. Too honorable to act on his feelings, neither can he bear the thought of spending time with her and the Duke as he would have to do as the Duke's political protege. So he decides to hire on with his old engineering firm and leave England again, and he only seeks out Nan to convince her to go with him after hearing that she has left the Duke.

The resolution of Nan and Guy's love story is only part of the appeal of Mainwaring's brilliant ending. She pulls together the threads placed by Wharton herself, drawing on the characterizations and events laid out in those earlier chapters to craft a delightfully satisfying conclusion. Reinforcing the titular theme as she ties up the loose ends, she puts on display the awe-inspiring talents of the truest buccaneers of them all, the Elmsworth sisters, as they surreptitiously aid the cause of Nan and Guy in pursuit of their own ambitious but believably achievable aims.

As is quite often the case, Wharton's later work doesn't quite measure up to her earlier masterpieces, such as Ethan Frome, which is what I would recommend to anyone new to this writer, and being her last (unfinished) novel it lacks the polish of her other books. Marion Mainwaring has done a pretty good job of completing it though, better - I think - than other reviewers here give her credit for.

It took me a little while to get into this story as there is quite an extensive cast list and many characters are known by two names, their actual name (eg Annabel) and their nickname (Nan) which seem to be used interchangeably and often alternately on the same page. Similarly you get the English aristocracy with their titles and family names and I found myself keeping a note of the names of the various characters to avoid confusion.

Wharton has fun exposing the petty snobberies of New York society as well as the pointless traditions of the British class system, as when the Dowager Duchess of Tintagel says "What would happen next, as I said to her, in a house where the housekeeper DID take her meals with the upper servants?".

This is a story of the clash of the Old World and the New, of marriages of convenience, of infidelities and boredom. But the key character throughout this book, the person who holds the plot together, is Laura Testvalley (or Testavaglia which is her original name) who belongs in neither camp being the daughter of Italian immigrants. An unmarried governess with spirit and allure, she perhaps points to a more independent style of womanhood and provides a contrast to the other female characters in this novel.

The story ends on a note of hope and optimism in contrast to other novels by Wharton which end in sadness and despair. Is that the ending she envisaged, or was this tacked on to make the book more appealing to modern readers?