‘The Buccaneers’ review: What if Edith Wharton, but ‘Gossip Girl’?

In the opening pages of “The Buccaneers,” Edith Wharton’s novel about American heiresses of the 1870s looking to marry Englishmen with titles, Mrs. St. George, the mother of the central character, regards her daughter’s chances. “Nan, though certainly not a beauty like (her sister) Virginia, was going to be fascinating, and by the time her hair was put up, the St. George girls need fear no rivalry.”

Still, she worried. There was the daughter of an acquaintance named Lizzy Elmsworth, whose “dark eyebrows had a bolder curve, and Lizzy’s foot — ah, where in the world did an upstart Elmsworth get