Ahoy There Mates!

I've been a fan of Edith Wharton's work for quite a while. Somehow, I never got Ethan Frome in high school so this bleak novel didn't get the chance to turn me off from books by the woman I consider one of the best authors of the late 19th–early 20th century.

Because of my research for my Nellie Bly novel, EXPOSURE (which will be out in April), I've become quite a student of the Gilded Age and its denizens, such as the three women in the portrait on this cover.

This edition's publisher, Viking, does not identify this painting but I believe that the woman on the far right is Consuelo Vanderbilt while the woman in the center is Jennie Jerome, the American mother of Winston Churchill.

It is possible that the woman on the left is one of Jennie's sisters.

Unlike Jane Austen, who has a sunniness about her as well as a deep appreciation for the silly in humankind, Wharton is reserved, her outlook constricted. This is the ruling tone for Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth (which is anything but mirthful).

But I think this constriction is a bit less bleak in The Age of Innocence. And by the time Wharton started working on The Buccaneers (it was her last novel, left unfinished at her death), she'd lived through World War I and wanted, perhaps, to feel that love should have its way at last.

I also think that The Buccaneers could be classified as an author's revenge novel. All fiction writers harbor thoughts of getting even with those who have wronged them by exposing them in the pages of their books. Mystery writer Sue Grafton, for example, killed off her first husband in her first novel, A Is for Alibi.

In The Buccaneers, Wharton creates a cold, monsterish husband for the youngest of the four American women who bears a close resemblance to Wharton's own husband, the dissipated and disappointing Teddy Wharton. She also includes parts of the stories behind Consuelo's marriage to the Duke of Marlborough as well as Jennie's wedding to Lord Randolph Churchill.

Let's just say that what lies beneath is not pretty.

I think one of the best ways to appreciate Wharton is by listening to Age of Innocence on audiobook. Her sentence structures are so tight just the slightest change would destroy them. She is a mistress of reserve, saying no more than necessary so that the reader has just the right amount of information to fill in the rest.

I love her understatement and her keen eye, well-trained by the society she depicted in her fiction. You know that expression "keeping up with the Joneses"? Well, Wharton was born into the Jones family that we're all supposed to keep up with.

I'd also recommend the BBC production of The Buccaneers. The acting is wonderful with lots of small scenes that stick in your head afterward. And the costumes are incredible!!