Let’s Never Do This to Edith Wharton Again

Edith Wharton’s unfinished 1938 novel, The Buccaneers, occupies much of its second half with the unhappy marriage of Annabel, an innocent American aesthete, and the Duke of Tintagel, a small, easily slighted man whose life’s passion is repairing clocks. As analogies, they read to me as pure Charles and Diana—the too-young woman who finds herself, on her wedding day, suddenly encased in a world with unknowable rules, and the man who chooses a wife based on the extent to which he thinks he can control her.

Wharton’s ruthless eye—my favorite of all her qualities—is at full bore as she describes the couple. When the duke cries that he’s sick of being tracked “like a wild animal” by marriageable ladies, Wharton observes that he does so while looking “excessively tame.” Again and again, she mocks the clocks. (The literary critic Edmund Wilsonisn’t an exceptional novel. But Annabel—or Nan, as she’s introduced—is spirited, strange, and untroubled by what people think of her. With her, Wharton does something new: She tries to imagine a fate for an extraordinary individual in conventional 1870s society that isn’t ultimately tragic.