Edith Wharton and Jane Austen -- TWO DIFFERENT AUTHORS!
11 July 2006
Seez, you seem to be very confused.

Edith Wharton and Jane Austen are two totally different authors. They both were women and both wrote socially-oriented novels, but that's about all they have in common.

Jane Austen was English. She lived from 1775 to 1817 and published only six books, two posthumously. The major theme of her books is genteel but impoverished young women trying to make advantageous marriages. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the story of The Buccaneers; she died 120 years before the book was written.

Edith Wharton was an American. A member of New York's old Society, she was born Edith Jones in 1862. She was married at age 23 to Teddy Wharton, a socially acceptable young man, but the union was not happy. She published her first book in 1900 and soon moved to France when she began to experience commercial success. She would spend much of the rest of her life in Europe, divorcing Teddy when he threatened to spend all her money, for as a best-selling author her income was large. Wharton's books center around the American social scene and the socially constricting expectations of that world; she usually portrays marriage as a sort of prison, as she herself experienced it. The Buccaneers (1937) was her last novel. She died before it was finished, but left an outline; it has actually been finished by several authors in several different versions based upon her notes.

And finally, it is not set in "the Regency period of English history" (that term refers specifically to the years 1811-1820). It is set in the 1870s.
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