Book Report:The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

OK, so I am a huge Edith Wharton fan.  I really enjoy an author who hones in on an aspect of society and puts it under a microscope.  I think that Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald are the best Americans at it, oh and maybe Upton Sinclair, but that is debatable. Tolstoy is the best Russian for that type of writing. That is really all I can think of in the genre.  These authors really go through the paces of portraying lives that are completely ruled by their social class and show how privilege can be just crippling to a person's character.

Back to Edith Wharton, I really enjoyed The Age of Innocence and I recently read the short story Roman Fever and I once started House of Mirth, but it is so mirthless that I had to let it go.  So, by the time that Edith Wharton wrote The Buccaneers, she had already been the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize (for The Age of Innocence). This book is a much faster read and does not really have the depth of a lot of Wharton's other work, but I listened to it and found it to be a GREAT listen.  Also, Edith Wharton passed away before she finished the book, so it was finished by someone else and you can see where the writing drops off and the heroine does not behave the way a Wharton protagonist typically would.

The gist of the story is that there are four young girls of new money trying desperately to break in to New York society.  This is impossible, but when one of their friends elopes with the lesser son of British nobility, an enterprising governess sees a way to force the girls into American society.  Since their friend has married in British nobility, the upstart Americans must be received by the family of the new husband.  If one nobel house has agreed that the girls may visit, then the other royal houses must also open their doors.  Changes to British tax laws mean that the British are having great difficulty holding onto their vast estates and they need the new money from America to increase their wealth.  So many British noblemen married new American money. This is actually how Jennie Churchill ended up marrying Winston's father Randolph.  Anyway, the idea of the governess is that once the girls have been accepted by British nobility, no one in American society could turn them away.

I would recommend the book. I think it is a good quick introduction to Wharton if you are not ready to dive into The Age of Innocence.