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Picture Manhattan high society in the late 1890s: a decadent world in which privileged young women fill their evenings with wild parties and their days with shopping, all the while attracting the attention of a gossip-hungry press.

Okay, so not much has changed for the Hilton sisters. Apart from the fake tans and unashamed pantylessness, the inimitable Paris and Nicky would be right at home in the pages of The Luxe (Harper Teen), a young-adult novel by American author Anna Godbersen. The teen bodice ripper is an international hit, published in 11 countries with fat sequels to follow.

Its success is easy to understand. The Luxe is exactly my sort of trash: a compelling melodrama that demands nothing but basic literacy and opposable thumbs on the part of its reader. And it is timely - not just because of the recent explosion in the young-adult fiction market, but for the way it exposes the bad behaviour of idle adolescents who have little else to do in life but keep themselves out of scandal, yet somehow manage to do just the opposite.

"The Victorians didn't have celebrities in the sense that we do now. It was all about watching the rich," Godbersen, who is just 27 herself, says during a phone interview from her home in Brooklyn. "Cultural commentators talk about our time as the new Gilded Age. And that's because there's still this divide between the rich and the rest of us."

Sure, the celebutantes of today might play at designing their own line of handbags or releasing pop albums, but their main concerns - and cultural functions - remain entirely superficial and pleasure-focused.

The same can be said of the glamorously indulged cast of Manhattan private school brats on the hit show Gossip Girl, a vehicle inspired by a young-adult novel series of the same name. Although set more than a century apart, parallels between the two works of teen fiction are obvious.

A romantic suspense thriller, The Luxe opens with the mysterious death of Elizabeth Holland, the book's beautiful and seemingly irreproachable heroine. Godbersen then takes readers on a sultry behind-the-velvet-curtain tour of teen socialites behaving badly in their parents' pantries. Amid the skirt swishing and carriage groping sessions, there is plenty of attention to historical detail and a handful of expertly crafted plot twists.

As far as this new genre's aim, Gossip Girl author Cecily von Ziegesar's blurb for The Luxe says it all: "Mystery, romance, jealousy, betrayal, humour and gorgeous historically accurate details. Edith Wharton, Jane Austen and Agatha Christie rolled into one - without the boring parts."

One can only assume that the "boring parts" von Ziegesar refers to are the moments of human insight and social criticism that made Wharton and Austen famous - and that the modern books lack.

"I would never seriously compare myself to Edith Wharton," Godbersen says to her credit (if only Candace Bushnell would follow suit). "Her books are about exposing social hypocrisy of her time. That's not what my book is about, though to be fair, the characters do have to choose between the world of privilege and being true to themselves."

And that's the other reason the books resonate: Godbersen has hit on the strange parallel between historical high society and contemporary adolescence. Just think of all the classics that have been successfully updated for the contemporary teen market, among them Emma (Clueless) and Dangerous Liaisons (Cruel Intentions). It turns out that 19th-century young aristocrats and modern teenagers have a lot in common, at least on the page. Both tend toward romantic histrionics (fainting, shortness of breath, make-out sessions in the pantry) in lives that are hampered by unbearable societal constraints.

"There's something about Victorian morals that regular adolescents can identify with," Godbersen says. "You hear all the time about kids living such amoral lives - and some do. But the truth is for many teenagers, they live with curfews and rules. They live with a mythological level of 'can't.' Things are forbidden and people are evil and if somebody finds out you kissed the wrong person, it's the end of the world. You feel you can never, ever go to school ever again."

Of course, none of these rules apply to Miley Ray Cyrus or Hayden Panettiere. The crucial difference between the young women in The Luxe and the tabloid fixtures of today is the existence of social constraints. Today's post-adolescent upper crust lives in a world hampered only by paparazzi presence and DUI convictions. There is no pressure to marry, attend church or keep up appearances, much less serve society.

But like the bratty fictional artistos, today's celebutantes still manage to be made miserable by status, despite their freedom. Perhaps the Victorian constraints of adolescence that continue to afflict most regular non-famous young people today are not so bad after all.

They don't need corsets, but the Hilton sisters would edify themselves by reading Edith Wharton. And if they find that too boring, they can always read The Luxe.