The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton (1993)

The Buccaneers was Edith Wharton's last book, left unfinished and then initially published on her death in 1937; Marion Mainwaring (a Wharton scholar) added her own ending (apparently based on a Wharton outline) in 1993. Which shows, but doesn't necessarily detract from the book.

The novel takes place during the height of the Gilded Age; the "buccaneers" are five American girls of wealth (but not New York society, a bone of contention among one of their mothers) who marry (or are scheming to marry, at the end of the book) British peers / gentry (with many, many direct nods to the sad story of Alva and Conseulo Vanderbilt).

Saratoga, very unfashionable, is where the novel begins, with two of the sisters, Virginia and Nan, befriending the other three - Lizzy and Mabel Elmsworth (whose mother is vulgar and loud) and Conchita, who was clearly based on the woman for whom Conseulo Vanderbilt was named, Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester who was Cuban, not Brazilian. Conchita is the "dangerous" one, who marries into the nobility first. The other girls are assisted in this by the Nan St. George's Italian turned English government, Miss Testvalley, and Jacky March, an American who was jilted by a British lord but continues to live in England, apparently matchmaking (and being part of schemes). Virginia eventually marries a marquis (as part of the best scene in the book); Lizzy marries an up and coming British MP; Mabel marries an elderly "cereal king" who leaves her the richest widow in the world; Nan marries the Duke of Tintagel, who is vaguely and mysteriously awful to her. This relationship is the flip side of The Age of Innocence marriage of the Count and Countess Olenska. But, like The Age of Innocence, we get only a taste of why the marriage is a bad one. At least with TAOI, the marriage plot was overseas and while necessary to the plot, the details weren't necessarily integral; The Duke of Tintagel, on the other hand, doesn't seem at all that bad (he's certainly not as wicked as the Duke of Marlborough).

That's part of the overall flaws of this book. There is a skeleton, some muscle tissue, some sinews - but not a complete body. In fact, occasionally it's like the bones of five bodies thrown together, and Wharton was trying to rebuild them as one. Even that skeleton, though, is incredibly well written, with vivid characters.

(It's almost like some characters have two or three skeletons though - Mrs. St. George, for example, seems to shift slightly throughout the book. She's much more languid at the beginning and much more Alva Vanderbiltish at the end.).

I guess another problem I had was that I wanted more, and even with Marion Mainwaring (a name that sounds like it came from a Wharton book) it still wasn't quite enough. Telling the interconnected stories of five beautiful girls was going to take a longer book than this one - maybe even several.