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, in reality, very much a runway to see

and be seen, to judge, categorize, elevate, or eliminate.

The real-life models Edith Wharton used to portray her spirited yet naive, fine young

heroines, were in both truth and fiction known as the buccaneers.

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