Times of London
January 18, 1995

BBC writes sex scenes into tale of 19th-century English society
ALEXANDRA FREAN

BBC has rewritten Edith Wharton's novel The Buccaneers to make the Pounds 5
million television dramatisation more appealing to a mass audience.

The five-part adaptation of Wharton's study of 19th-
century society, which starts next month on BBC1, has a rape and a homosexual
encounter that are not in the book. Characters' names and some locations have
been changed for the screen version of Wharton's unfinished novel, which was
published posthumously.

The last two television episodes are the work of the scriptwriter Maggie
Wadey, based loosely on Wharton's notes. She said yesterday: ``I never actually
stopped and thought what would Edith Wharton have done at this moment or how
would she have written this particular part, because I think that would have
resulted in a pastiche. I wanted to respond to the material as if it were my
own. I followed the currents of the book itself, the impulses that were already
there and, of course, the notes that she had left.''

Ms Wadey, whose credits include an adaptation of Jane Austen's Northanger
Abbey for the BBC, added: ``It sounds very presumptuous, but inevitably when
you're adapting you are exercising a certain amount of criticism.''

Phillippa Giles, executive producer, said that the BBC had tried to make the
production accessible to a BBC1 audience. ``If it had been made for BBC2, it
would have been different.'' She felt free to make changes because The
Buccaneers was not a well-known masterpiece. ``You could not take such
liberties with Jane Austen because everyone has read her books ten times over.''
Wharton was born in 1862 into New York society. In 1921 she became the first
woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Age of Innocence. In The
Buccaneers she tells the story of a group of spirited young American women who
enter the English social world of the 1870s.

Ms Giles said that the rape scene was true to the spirit of the novel. ``We
wanted to portray the character Nan's marriage as one that was unfulfilled and
one that was only consummated by the social pressures on her husband to produce
an heir.'' There were protests about alterations to the ending of BBC2's recent
adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit. The treatment of Wharton's work is unlikely to
cause such criticism.

Dr Jean Chothia, an expert on American literature at Selwyn College,
Cambridge, said: ``The BBC version may be rather crude, but Wharton herself was
not a genteel writer.''