Anyone who is following the series The Buccaneers on Apple TV Plus and has not read Edith Wharton‘s book has already realized that the silent housekeeper Laura Testvalley is anything but a subservient woman. Actress Simone Kirby‘s character is both affectionate and suspicious and is obviously linked to the unhappiness and hopes of the young ‘buccaneers’ who lead the plot, especially Nan St. George (Kristine Frøseth). At the end of the fourth episode, we see her exchange meaningful glances with Colonel St. George (Adam James) and an intimate moment with Lord Richard Marable (Josh Dylan). Is she a villain or a good girl?

To try to figure out who Laura Testvalley really is, let’s balance what we know in the book and what the series suggests, waiting for confirmation. We’re halfway through the story and it’s still a mystery.

My theory is that Laura is Nan’s real mother, although the original is just a psychological mother. It’s not clear at first, but Mrs. Testvalley is the St. George girls’ governess because Mrs. Saint George (Christina Hendricks) wanted to make up for the fact that she couldn’t prepare her daughters to shine in society without a British governess, who would teach them to become ‘ladies’. We already met her at Conchita Clossom’s (Alisha Boe) wedding to Lord Richard and she is the governess who suggests the bride’s friends travel to England and prepares them to ‘debut’ in British society. The suggestion seemed more like an order from Richard (now we know why) and in theory it would help Conchita adapt to rigid British society and help her friends find husbands too. Later, when Nan starts to give trouble and threatens to disrupt the plan, Mrs. Testvalley takes the young woman on a trip close to the palace of Theo (Guy Remmers), the Duke of Tintagel, leading Nan and Theo to meet and fall in love (?), something more than convenient. Now that we have seen that she and Lord Richard were or are lovers, her every initiative becomes suspicious.

In the book, even more so, in Edith Wharton‘s unfinished book, forty-year-old Laura Testvalley is a modern and mysterious character. Typically in the author’s books, sexuality and scandalous extra-marital affairs are in the plot, revealing that social repression did not hold back women’s real fire, and also liked to explore the dichotomy of the female role. In The Buccaneers, the governess is a surrogate mother who educates and also covers, making Nan both a girl and a woman. In the literary version, she enters Nan St. George’s life when she is sixteen years old, at the height of her difficulty balancing a curious, rebellious, and creative nature when the opposite was expected of a woman.

Mrs. Testvalley knows how to give Nan emotional support without feeling trapped, described by the writer as “an adventurer, but with a big soul”, being precise about when to feed the protagonist’s desires as well as when to attract attention and keep her in line, without victimizing her, also in Wharton’s words, “although Miss Testvalley was often kind, she was rarely tender.” What is – and will be surprising – is that behind the slender figure she is a woman who deals with sexuality with an unusual freedom for the time. She has lovers (young or older) and will still find overwhelming passion. So it is!

Laura Testvalley is sly and modern, an interesting combination. Just as Conchita is Brazilian in the book, Mrs. Testvalley has an Italian background, highlighting the sensuality and less restricted view of the culture, which is cliché, but also makes more sense than placing this brutal difference in Ango-Saxon inhibitions on Americans. In the Apple series so far, the origins of the two – Conchita and Laura – are not highlighted and even apparently changed. But the prominence of the Brazilian quote in the original story is important because it reinforces the importance of the Latin imaginary, where contact with Brazil (whether by Conchita or Guy going to Rio), releases everyone’s repressed sexual instincts, and where Brazilian culture relaxes people.

Edith Wharton‘s view of Laura Testvalley is more important than Conchita’s. Of Italian origin, she had an affair with Lord Richard that she considered over. She was happy while it lasted, but it was in the past. Which didn’t stop her from using her influence on him to invite his girls to the most important ball in British society. Always supporting Nan, in the book, she is the one who somehow feeds the girl’s romantic fantasies, reading poetry and talking about passionate love. Importantly, in the book she is not Nan’s biological mother, she just thinks that ‘she could have been my own daughter’, clearly being the governess’ favorite.

The bond between Laura and Nan should grow in the series because, in the original story, it will be Mrs. Tentsvalley’s sacrifice that will save the heroine from an unhappy fate. Yes, more SPOILERS ahead.

In the 1995 series, The Buccaneers featured a secretly homosexual Theo as the reason his marriage to Nan failed. As far as we see in the 2023 series, their romance was too quick, but it seems genuine. He keeps the secret that he knows that Guy Thwarte (Matthew Broome), his best friend, is in love with Nan and as she doesn’t even know about this love, she is induced to choose the wrong husband. It is a fact of the original story that the personality differences between Nan and Theo, which at first seem to be ‘opposites attract’ will be the great catalyst for extreme unhappiness between them. In the original story, there is no connection between the young woman and her mother-in-law, on the contrary, so quickly what we see on Conchita’s face is also Nan’s fate until Mrs. Testvalley intervenes again.

Another difference in the series is transforming Mrs. Saint George into a caring woman, keeping only her insecurity and hope that her daughters will “marry well”. In the book, because she is afraid of associating with the wrong people, she is always attracting her daughters’ attention in public, clearly falling short of the maternal role expected of her. This part is hinted at in the series when she seems to be trying too hard and taking away from the more traditional women even in New York, but is a loving mother. The other mothers are also less fit for the mission than Mrs. Testvalley: Lizzie and Mabel Elmsworth’s mother lacks Polish and Conchita’s mother (who does not appear) is a divorced Brazilian who married an American and prefers to stay in the room and smoke cigars. It is Laura who changes a calamitous scenario for the girls.

Coming from Europe, Laura Testvalley’s proposal to take the girls to England is also to take them away from their inconvenient mothers. Having the experience of educating the daughters of an English duchess, she is the ideal “nanny” and leads the invasion “like a general”, creating perfect strategies for the objective of the trip. Without sacrificing your own plans, of course.

Girls marry into English society. Conchita with Lord Richard, Laura’s ex-lover, but they don’t get along and are soon mutually unfaithful. Lizzie Elmsworth (Aubri Ibrag), goes through sexual and psychological abuse, but marries a member of Parliament and will be happy (her character is inspired by Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill and became the mother of Winston Churchill), Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) who adjusts to the British, but who marries the cruel and abusive Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick), and, of course, Nan, who marries the Duke of Tintagel, but who suffers from the severity of his mother-in-law and the charge of generating heirs (without being able to).

Laura will witness from a distance how Nan’s joy in life gradually fades away, trapped in a hasty marriage that wears out quickly. After the protégé becomes a duchess, the governess has to work with another family, so she cannot help Nan as she would like, but she responds immediately when called and, especially, when she notices the former protégé’s sadness. At this point, Laura is in love and having a romance with no one other than Guy’s father and decides, boldly, to help the young woman get out of a loveless marriage. It’s just going to be expensive. She is about to become Mrs. Thwarte, in love and physically satisfied, with sparkle in her eyes and skin and wearing her hair down instead of her hairstyle of buns and braids. At the time, to allude that a woman over 40 could be so clearly sexually satisfied, even implicitly, was bold. Conchita is also described as physically more relaxed and healthy when her extramarital affair begins.

Still about Laura, we will also see that she will be a victim of ageism. Except for Nan, who defends her, the girls will joke about her “rejuvenation” when she is in love as if an ‘older’ woman lost the right to passion. The American Miss March, sixty and forgotten, will be the object of ridicule from girls who strive to imagine her younger, more adorable, and in love, especially since she was forgotten even by her former fiancé (Conchita and Jinny’s father-in-law).

With two clear examples that a woman could – and should – be complete and happy (her and Conchita), Laura sacrifices her opportunity to marry the man she loves to help Nan escape with her lover and his son. This is because Sir Helmsley Thwarte had political plans for Guy and the fact that he ran away with the Duke’s wife disrupts everything. Laura ends the story alone, sacrificing the rare chance to gain social elevation, financial security, and companionship in her declining years with a marriage that even more so would have been one of love. Laura Testvalley’s renunciation is as important, if not more, than Nan’s embrace of a life of passion because she determines that she will return “alone to old age and poverty,” with no chance of new love or sex so that his “surrogate daughter” can have it all.

I suspect that the series, which removed the distance between Mrs. St. George and Nan, will even move on to the fact that Laura Testvalley is the heroine’s real mother, making her final sacrifice for that reason. But the changes, including Nan’s relationship with her mother-in-law, due to the implied sisterhood, are a contrast to the reality of the original story, where there was no expectation of female friendship in a world “competitive for the best husband”. The escape and romance part between Nan and Guy was in an unfinished draft by Edith Wharton, whose stories are not traditionally known for “happy endings,” so purists question the conclusion of The Buccanneers, published decades after the (unfinished) original was the author’s last book. It looks like the series will follow this conclusion.

Therefore, Nan may be the protagonist but the true heroine of The Buccaneers is actually the housekeeper Laura Testvalley, the common point of all characters, mentor, lover, guide, and essential in the conclusion of everyone’s lives.

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