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The collected letters of England's best-loved comic writer
The author of almost a hundred books and the creator of Jeeves, Blandings Castle, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Red and Mr Mulliner, P.G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 and educated at Dulwich College. After two years with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank he became a full-time writer, contributing to a variety of periodicals including Punch and the Globe. He married in 1914. As well as his novels and short stories, he wrote lyrics for musical comedies with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and at one time had five musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. His time in Hollywood also provided much source material for fiction. Sophie Ratcliffe is a tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford, specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. She also reviews fiction and criticism for the national press. She lives in Oxford with her husband and young son.
Wodehouse said letters make "a wonderful oblique form for an
autobiography," and Sophie Ratcliffe's expertly edited collection
amply proves the point.
*Spectator*
Anybody requiring evidence of how much work PG Wodehouse put into
his comic prose should read his letters. In her introduction to
this definitive compendium of Wodehouse's correspondence, Sophie
Ratcliffe warns that [the letters] display only on occasions the
extraordinary stylistic elan that one finds in fiction. Indeed they
do, although when the extraordinary elan bubbles briefly to the
surface, it is worth waiting for. But Wodehouse was a dedicated
craftsman. He wanted his published words to make people laugh, and
he devoted hour after hour to making them fit that purpose. One
suspects his personal epistles were often a happy relief from that
discipline.
*Scotland on Sunday*
The great catastrophe of his life was of course, his broadcasting
from Berlin in 1941, a slur on his reputation that never quite went
goes away however often it is expunged. The whole saga is
unravelled again here in Sophie Ratcliffe's excellent linking
narrative.
*Daily Mail*
Filtered by some excellent editing, [these letters] are full of
interest
*Mail on Sunday*
Sophie Ratcliffe has done an exemplary job in editing these
letters
*Sunday Telegraph*
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