HBO’s The Gilded Age may just have returned for its second season, but those craving even more 19th-century nouveau riche drama already have a new guilty pleasure to binge. Premiering November 8 on Apple TV+, The Buccaneers follows the friendship of five American girls as they infiltrate 1870s London society in the hopes of procuring a lord or duke—or at least that’s what their mothers want. The group consists of Virginia “Jinny” St. George (Imogen Waterhouse), Annabel “Nan” St. George (Kristine Froseth), Elizabeth “Lizzy” Elmsworth (Aubri Ibrag), Mabel Elmsworth (Josie Totah), and Conchita Closson (Alisha Boe).
“The transatlantic visitor’s looks were polished, her clothes impeccable and—within the bounds of complete propriety—her manner was inviting and lightly flirtatious,” writes author Anne de Courcy in her 2018 book, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy. “She also exuded that compelling quality, complete self-confidence. For she did not, like an English girl, regard herself as a second-class citizen, nor had she been treated, as English girls were from birth onwards, as much the least important member of the family. All her circumstances conspired to make her feel that she was mistress of her fate—or to believe that she was.”
This cultural clash is at the center of The Buccaneers, an eight-episode series based on Edith Wharton’s (famously unfinished) novel of the same name. The legendary author—known for her wit, social nuance, and firsthand experience growing up among New York City’s upper crust—had been about three-fifths into writing the book when she died of a stroke in 1937. The Buccaneers was published posthumously in 1938, though Wharton did leave notes revealing some of her intentions for concluding the story; author and translator Marion Mainwaring, who had assisted literary critic R. W. B. Lewis on his Pulitzer- and Bancroft Prize-winning 1976 biography of Wharton, used them to complete the novel in 1993, though it ultimately received mixed reviews. Today, both versions are available for purchase—though the Apple TV+ series’ creator, Katherine Jakeways, and executive producer Beth Willis exclusively used the first third of the novel as its jumping-off point.
“It was such a gift to adapt because the characters are so fully formed on the page,” Jakeways, a British comedian, actress, and writer, tells Vogue of the book, which Willis had aspired to bring to screen for a decade. “We were desperate to see women onscreen brought to life in a way that wasn’t as stiff-backed, gossipy, and marriage obsessed as traditional period dramas, whilst at the same time [retaining] lots of traditional period-drama elements, like the costumes and locations,” says Willis, whose production credits include the BBC drama Ashes to Ashes and the fifth and sixth series of Doctor Who. In addition to expanding each of the book’s main characters, the all-female creative team diversified the cast, added a queer-relationship storyline, and complicated Nan St. George’s love triangle by making one of her suitors, Theo, Duke of Tintagel (Guy Remmers), a “more sympathetic” character than Ushant, his equivalent in the book, says Jakeways.
Much like how Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette charmed viewers by putting them into its naive protagonist’s wistful headspace, The Buccaneers homes in on the roller-coaster vulnerability of its female heroines as they navigate a new country and impending womanhood. While there is no shortage of romance— including, in true historical fashion, that which is unrequited and unrealized—The Buccaneers series’ “great love story” is its female friendships, says Jakeways.
“The girls may fall out, have jealousies, make mistakes, and let each other down, but, really, there’s nothing they wouldn’t do for each other,” says Jakeways. And, as every girl and her friends can relate to, “the best bit of any party is when they get back into the room at the end of the night, take their corsets off, and go, ‘Oh, my God, can you believe that she did that at that party?’”
The girl-power vibe is echoed in the ultracontemporary soundtrack (all-female artists, of course), including songs written by the likes of Warpaint and Gracie Abrams especially for the show. Emily Kokal and Miya Folick cover LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum” (an apt, tongue-in-cheek choice) for the drama’s theme song, while in one of the most moving scenes, as apprehensive debutantes walk down a staircase holding numbers and waiting to be claimed by their male counterparts, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers’s “Nothing New” plays. Willis strove to harness the way Swift “speaks to her audience and makes them feel that her songs are written for them.”
Wharton’s flair for introspective, sharp-eyed narratives is what has made her writing resonate for generations. Born in New York City in 1862 to an upper-class family (her father’s first cousin was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor), she witnessed firsthand the confines of society living. Taught by tutors and governesses, she expressed interest in writing as a child, though the profession was considered unsuitable for a woman. Still, the many courtships she entertained in the 1880s—including one that her family disapproved of—helped to shape some of her finest novels. With The Age of Innocence in 1921, for example, Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In her lifetime she’d pen 15 novels, 85 short stories, numerous poems, and books on design, travel, and more. She visited Europe extensively during her childhood, and in 1913 she divorced and moved permanently to France, where she was awarded a Legion of Honor for her humanitarian efforts during World War I. Her familiarity with both New York and Europe’s cosmopolitan cities made her uniquely suited to write The Buccaneers.
In fact, according to R. W. B. Lewis’s biography of Wharton, she was childhood friends with some of the women who inspired the characters in the book, namely Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester, and the Jerome sisters, including Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother. Also essential was Consuelo Vanderbilt, who notoriously suffered a loveless marriage to the Duke of Marlborough—an 1895 article in the Los Angeles Herald snarkily described their nuptials as “an important commercial transaction at Newport,” with Vanderbilt being “the merchandise.” These were among the hundreds of women dubbed dollar princesses, new-money Americans (generally not accepted into old New York society) who married British aristocracy (largely in financial ruin after the US began cultivating grain on its own land rather than importing England’s). It was, in essence, an exchange of title for a generous dowry. These women would continue to influence the country’s leadership; Princess Diana, for example, was a descendant of the American stock and railway heiress Frances Ellen Work, who married (and eventually divorced) the third Baron Fermoy.
During the late 19th century, the phenomenon was so prevalent that there was even a publication called Titled Americans that listed women and their newly gained titles, as well as eligible UK bachelors and their estates and incomes. As was the case in The Buccaneers, however, many of the women struggled to adapt to English society, where they had fewer freedoms than in America—not to mention that their manor homes were typically outfitted with fewer modern conveniences. All this provided ample fodder for Wharton. As The New York Times wrote of The Buccaneers, “Under Wharton’s icy gaze, every fault in American refinement meets its likeness in the ignorance, self-importance, and unthinking conventionality of the English aristocrat.”
Another important dollar princess was Minnie Stevens, daughter of hotelier Paran Stevens, who married British general Sir Arthur Henry Fitzroy Paget in 1878. Of the nuptials The New York Times wrote: “The Anglo-American marriage which took place in London Saturday will send a thrill of envy through some thousands of feminine breasts…. It is quite true that an American lady cannot, while on American soil, become a Marchioness of Salisbury or a Madame Waddington. The rich brilliant American woman thus labors under a sense of the absence of an end to achieve which satisfies her imagination, whereas the same woman would, in England, not merely have social aims to satisfy, but further, would probably be keenly interested in her husband’s political career.” The same article describes “the wave of Anglo-mania which has swept over our fashionable society” and lured American women in with its “rank and title, old castles, manors, halls, deer parks, the hunting field, the Guards, the Court.”
With such beguiling lives riveting both Americans and those across the pond, the real-life women who inspired The Buccaneers indeed lived through enough drama to fuel many subsequent seasons—and easily entirely new shows or spin-offs too.