Whether you're a fan of HBO's The Guilded Age, recounting the plight of an heiress very similar

to that of Consuela Vanderbilt or Apple TV's The Buccaneers, now at its second season, loosely

based on the unfinished Edith Wharton novel, or maybe you're just a fan of Downton Abbey, which is

coming back in a theatrical release for the final time later this year.

We think you'll enjoy this gilded gentleman episode on the fascinating phenomenon known as the dollar princesses or million dollar princesses.

Young women caught in their family's quests for prestige, wealth, and status.

Edith Wharton opens her posthumously published unfinished final novel, The Buccaneers, with a scene set on a sunny,

sultry day of midsummer in 1870. The characters we first meet in the novel are sitting on the wide

veranda of the fashionable yet rustic Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, no doubt sipping

iced lemonade to diffuse the heat of the afternoon.

Saratoga was long famous in the 19th century for its hot springs, beautiful scenery,

and the racing. It was, you could say, the Newport of the stylish set long before that seaside social enclave set on the Rhode Island

coast found its height of popularity.

In the early pages of the novel, we meet Wharton's teenage protagonists, the St. George

sisters, Nan and Virginia, the dark-haired Conchita Closson, and the stylish Lizzie Elmsworth and her sister Mabel.

All young daughters of wealthy New York families approaching marriageable age.

As the girls sit and stroll on the veranda or runabout on the lawns, we begin to understand that the stakes in their young lives could not be

higher or less carefree. Seated watching overall are their mothers, Mrs. St. George and Mrs.

Elmsworth. These families are from substantial but new money and while secure in financial status,

it would require new strategies and new social

tactics to make sure the St. George's, the Elmsworths, and certainly the Klossons, were allowed

to pass through the gates of society. That seemingly hospitable, lazy hotel veranda was,

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