RWB Lewis has noted that Edith Wharton had been friends from early girlhood with a group of women who included Consuelo Yznaga (the Duchess of Manchester) and the Jerome sisters," a cluster of comely trans-Atlantic invaders in the^ tfs" to whom she" would devote her last and remarkable, though unfinished, novel, The Buc-caneers"(Lewis, 41). He also notes that Conchita Santo-Dios of The Buccaneers" combines features of Minnie Stevens and of Edith's friend, the former Consuelo Yznaga"(Lewis, 528). Actually, when one narrows down to a close reading of the novel, one can find a more specific source connected with these women which creates the chief model for the novel.

The international marriage behind the marriages of the young American girls in Mrs. Wharton's novel, The Buc-caneers, may well have been the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American heiress of the Vanderbilt millions, to the ninth Duke of Marlborough, as well as the subsequent scandals connected with their separation. The summer before the marriage in 1895, Consuelo's mother, Alva Vanderbilt, had discovered that her daughter was in love with Winthrop Rutherford, the son of a professor of astronomy at Harvard and a distinguish-ed photographer, a relationship she wished to break up because she had destined Consuelo, then an eighteen-year-old, for a brilliant, aristocratic, English marriage. Alva had met the Duke of Marlborough in England and invited him to Newport, an invitation which he accepted the following September. He spent two weeks there, was agreeable to the match and the wedding took place on November 6, 1895.