Henry and Diana enjoy a rich and intimate life with each other that seems untainted by their chaotic and competitive external world. He has to hide his love for Diana from his father, playing along with the wedding plans. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Henry is being forced into the engagement by his overly ambitious and protective father. Finally, Elizabeth has to reconcile all of this with her own affair with Will Keller, her childhood friend and a servant in the Holland household. Penelope tries to leverage Elizabeth’s secret financial instability to throw her out of the running. Meanwhile, Elizabeth doesn’t know that Penelope Hayes, her clever and social best friend, is also being entertained by Henry and is secretly competing for Henry.

To secure her and her sister’s futures, Elizabeth agrees to marry Henry, a narrow-minded, rich bachelor whose father is an industry magnate. None of his famous wealth has been left to them. Upon their father’s death, the two girls learn that their position is more unstable than they had assumed. Until recently, Elizabeth and Diana have seemed to be navigating this life successfully, and are commonly perceived as rulers of the social scene. The teenaged characters in the novel are enamored by their first forays into Manhattan social life and all that it brings: dating, competition, and great risk. Here, appearance is the most important value, replacing all moral virtues as the ultimate sign of viability and personal triumph. The upper-class Manhattan world is characterized as saturated by power and luxury, but also incorrigibly broken and deceitful. Retreating two weeks into the past, the novel begins to draw out the events that led to Elizabeth’s death and the various people who made the sisters’ life a struggle. Elizabeth’s fiancé, Henry Schoonmaker, who harbors a secret crush on Diana, notes that the circumstances of Mr. Elizabeth died just before she was to marry into one of the city’s richest families, reinforcing the sisters’ position. Diana and Elizabeth were known as daughters of New York City’s elite tradition.

The book begins at the funeral of Elizabeth Holland. This complex, shifting, and non-linear plot serves to produce an anachronistic characterization of the destructive social dynamism of American capitalism’s upper echelons. The novel is structured episodically, rotating perspectives between three minor characters, as well as the two sisters who are its central protagonists. When the sisters’ father dies and his rich legacy suddenly holds no weight, they scramble to stabilize their lives before they fall from high society and are forced to undergo a drastic shift in consciousness. Set in 1899 New York, it follows two sisters, Elizabeth and Diana Holland, who hail from the elite class of Manhattan. Anna Godbersen’s young adult historical novel The Luxe (2007) is the first book in a tetralogy.

Rumors a luxe novel