The Buccaneers: A Novel

The Buccaneers: A Novel

The Buccaneers: A Novel

The Buccaneers: A Novel

Paperback(Revised Edition (1993))

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Overview

Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—now an original series on AppleTV+!

“Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review


Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful.

After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780140232028
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/01/1994
Series: Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century Series
Edition description: Revised Edition (1993)
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 31,457
Product dimensions: 5.15(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist. Educated by tutors and governesses, she was raised for only one career: marriage. But her marriage, in 1885, to Edward Wharton was an emotional disappointment, if not a disaster. She suffered the first of a series of nervous breakdowns in 1894. In spite of the strain of her marriage, or perhaps because of it, she began to write fiction and published her first story in 1889. Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but this was followed by several novels and story collections. They were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York, traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In Europe, she met Henry James, who became her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most careful critic of her fiction. The House of Mirth (1905) was both a resounding critical success and a bestseller, as was Ethan Frome (1911). In 1913 the Whartons were divorced, and Edith took up permanent residence in France.  Her subject, however, remained America, especially the moneyed New York of her youth. Her great satiric novel, The Custom of the Country was published in 1913 and The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. In her later years, she enjoyed the admiration of a new generation of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In all, she wrote some 30 books, including an autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937.

Marion Mainwaring (1922-2015) was an Edith Wharton scholar most notable for having completed Wharton’s unfinished manuscript The Buccaneers in 1993. In addition to her research focused on Wharton, Mainwaring also published several original works including the novels Murder in Pastiche: Or Nine Detectives All at Sea and Murder at Midyears, as well as a biography on Wharton's lover, Mysteries of Paris: The Quest for Morton Fullerton.

Date of Birth:

January 24, 1862

Date of Death:

August 11, 1937

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France

Education:

Educated privately in New York and Europe

What People are Saying About This

Leon Edel

Mainwaring has added gloss to the story's elegance and wit, and the novel emerges like a master's painting from the hands of a highly skilled restorer.

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