The Buccaneers

The Buccaneers is the last novel written by Edith Wharton. It was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937, and published in that form in 1938. Wharton's manuscript ends with Lizzy's inviting Nan to a house party to which Guy Thwarte has also been invited.

The story revolves around five wealthy and ambitious American girls, their guardians and the titled, landed but impoverished Englishmen who marry them as the girls participate in the London Season. As the novel progresses, the plot follows Nan and her marriage to the Duke of Tintagel.

It is a story of the morals held by fashionable society at the time, when it was considered more important to marry for social position than for romantic love. The novel is also a poignant example of art imitating life as the stories of the young women at the heart of the plot very strongly resemble many of the Gilded Age marriages between wealthy American heiresses and opportunistic English noblemen from the mid 1800s through to the early part of the twentieth century. Of particularly strong resemblance are the ill-fated marriages of American heiress Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough to the Duke of Marlborough and American heiress Lady Randolph Churchill to Lord Randolph Churchill of the family of the Dukes of Marlborough, and the especially advantageous marriages of other vastly wealthy American socialites such as Consuelo Montagu, Duchess of Manchester, whose generation of nobility marrying American heiresses was originally labeled "Buccaneers" in both American and English society.

After careful study of the synopsis and notes, Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring finished the novel with an ending very uncharacteristic of that found in any of Wharton's novels. Mainwaring's version was published by Penguin Books () in 1993. Independently, around the same time, screenwriter Maggie Wadey was commissioned to adapt and finish the novel for a television version co-produced by the BBC and American PBS broadcaster WGBH; it was screened on BBC 1 in the UK and in the Masterpiece Theatre series in the United States during 1995. This serial adaptation was directed by Philip Saville and executive produced by Phillippa Giles.

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