The Luxe

Anna Godbersen’s young adult historical novel The Luxe (2007) is the first book in a tetralogy. Set in 1899 New York, it follows two sisters, Elizabeth and Diana Holland, who hail from the elite class of Manhattan. 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. The novel is structured episodically, rotating perspectives between three minor characters, as well as the two sisters who are its central protagonists. 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 book begins at the funeral of Elizabeth Holland. Diana and Elizabeth were known as daughters of New York City’s elite tradition. Elizabeth died just before she was to marry into one of the city’s richest families, reinforcing the sisters’ position. Elizabeth’s fiancé, Henry Schoonmaker, who harbors a secret crush on Diana, notes that the circumstances of Mr. Holland’s disappearance are suspicious.

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. The upper-class Manhattan world is characterized as saturated by power and luxury, but also incorrigibly broken and deceitful. Here, appearance is the most important value, replacing all moral virtues as the ultimate sign of viability and personal triumph. 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. Until recently, Elizabeth and Diana have seemed to be navigating this life successfully, and are commonly perceived as rulers of the social scene.



Upon their father’s death, the two girls learn that their position is more unstable than they had assumed. None of his famous wealth has been left to them. To secure her and her sister’s futures, Elizabeth agrees to marry Henry, a narrow-minded, rich bachelor whose father is an industry magnate. 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. Penelope tries to leverage Elizabeth’s secret financial instability to throw her out of the running. 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.

Meanwhile, it is revealed that Henry is being forced into the engagement by his overly ambitious and protective father. He has to hide his love for Diana from his father, playing along with the wedding plans. Henry and Diana enjoy a rich and intimate life with each other that seems untainted by their chaotic and competitive external world. Lina, Elizabeth’s maid, is envious of Elizabeth’s privilege and tries to sell the Holland family’s secret for both social and financial gain. Along the way, she unexpectedly falls in love with Tristan Wrigley, a shop boy, who exposes her to and teaches her to value new elements of New York City’s rich lower class life.

The novel comes full circle, leading up to Elizabeth’s death. Struggling between accepting her family duty and marrying Henry or following her true love, her agonizing comes to an abrupt end when her carriage tips over on the edge of the East River. Her carriage plunges into the deep river and is swept away by the current. In its aftermath, New York grieves, and the gossip pages’ tabloid articles about the sisters are replaced by ones mourning her death. The characters separately ruminate on whether Elizabeth’s precarity drove her to suicide or whether someone wanted her dead. Though the question is never answered, it is implied that it could have been Henry, who wanted to run off with Diana.



From Elizabeth’s point of view, the identity of the killer is arbitrary, because she never was able to decide between her two choices. Godbersen’s novel deals first and foremost with this irony of arbitrariness, demonstrating through its separate perspectival accounts how individuals’ private motives collide with those of the people they live with, and form of their own accord powerful public stories that shed most of their original meaning.