The Adventures of Honoria Plum

He was sorry, he wrote, that he would be unable to see Miss Petherick-Soames on the morrow, as they had planned, owing to his unfortunately being called away to Australia. He added that he was pleased to have made her acquaintance and that if, as seemed probable, they never saw each other again, he would …

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A Damsel in Distress in Chichester

'How's the show going?' 'It's a riot. They think it will run two years in London. As far as I can make it out you don't call it a success in London unless you can take your grandchildren to see the thousandth night.' A Damsel in Distress (1919) To celebrate the recent anniversay of the …

A visit to P G Wodehouse’s Emsworth

This summer I visited the Hampshire town of Emsworth, where P.G Wodehouse once lived. He first arrived at the invitation of Herbert Westbrook, who was teaching at Emsworth House School. Westbrook is described in Sophie Ratcliffe's 'P.G.Wodehouse, A Life in Letters' as "handsome, charismatic, and permanently broke." He is forever associated in my mind with …

Wodehouse’s Birthday and the Chicago Caper

What Ho again, Plum lovers. It has been an especially glorious summer, right out of the pages of Blandings, and I've taken the opportunity to whiz about the countryside, capturing the atmosphere of Wodehouse's England. I've visited Plum's Emsworth in Hampshire and explored Bertie Wooster's London (in one of the last tours given by Wodehouse …

What P. G. Wodehouse learned from Macbeth

A wonderful piece from the excellent critic, Emsworth, reblogged with his kind permission.

EMSWORTH

It would be a joy to read Wodehouse even if his stories didn’t have more ingenious poetic allusions than there are stars in the sky. On the latest of our many happy passes through The Code of the Woosters — perhaps the very best of the Jeeves and Wooster novels — we started taking inventory.

Wodehouse starts with a taste of Keats on the very first page, as Jeeves tells Bertie Wooster, “There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn — season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” A few pages later, Sir Watkyn Bassett, a country magistrate who has it in for Bertie, assures Roderick Spode that time in prison won’t prevent a man from “rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.” That’s from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”

Bertie Wooster doesn’t know as much poetry as his friends, so his allusions are…

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Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen

A response to the critic Emsworth Emsworth, that worthy critic with an equally worthy name, suggests "P.G. Wodehouse had hung on too long when he wrote The Cat-Nappers" - The Cat-Nappers being an alias for the work known to British readers as Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. Emsworth provides some good evidence that this 1974 work of …