Keble College

Dear Society members

It was good to meet some of you at The George on The Strand in London at your Society gathering in 2007. Somewhere between gin and tonics, I addressed you about my forthcoming edition of PG Wodehouse’s letters and an epistolary response seemed, in some ways, appropriate for your website.

One of your questions has been how I first came across Wodehouse’s work. For me, it all began when I was 14 years old, looking along the orange spines of my parent's bookshelves. Probably at random, I pulled down a copy of a book called The Inimitable Jeeves. It was a summer afternoon, and I took it out into the garden, and for me, reading that book, it was as if someone had taken me to an entirely different world – I felt that I had made an amazing discovery. I asked my mother about the book, and she told me that the entire shelf of Wodehouse had belonged to my father, who had died the previous summer, and who had loved his work.

Since then, Wodehouse has always been very special to me. As a teenager I read my way through many of the Blandings novels, and dabbled with Psmith. I ended up quoting from "Monkey Business" in the Tragedy paper of my finals at Cambridge. And now, as I teach English at Oxford University, I prescribe Wodehouse to any of my undergraduates who seem to be drooping, or in need of solace. It seems to do the trick.

So why have I taken the letters project on? In the first place, it was Robert McCrum, who, together with Sir Edward Cazalet, Wodehouse’s grandson, saw the need for a new edition. While Frances Donaldson’s Yours Plum is an excellent and entertaining collection – it drew solely on those letters which were available in the UK. During his research for Wodehouse: A Life, McCrum came across hundreds of letters that have never been published.

Drawing on this, my edition will source Wodehouse’s letters from public and private archives all over the world – and its chronological arrangement allows for a broader and clearer sense of the range of this extraordinary writer’s life, and of the times in which he wrote. There’s not enough space to go into the details of particular letters here – but the edition promises new insights about all aspects of Wodehouse’s life – including his childhood ambitions, his friendships, his correspondence with well-known figures such as Conan Doyle, Gershwin and Arnold Bennett, his period in internment, and the way in which he constructed his novels, lyrics and plays.

In case this is starting to sound a touch worthy, I probably add that the letters also happen to be very funny – and sometimes terribly sad. The whole project is fascinating; there’s something quite extraordinary about sitting in archive, holding a physical copy of a letter – scrutinizing the pace in which it was written, wondering why there’s a splodge of coffee or if that drip on the margin might be a cocktail, and pondering how many times the missive might have been rewritten or crafted in itself (Wodehouse was famous for rewriting his letters). And I hope, in my edition, to shed some light on these things – to think, not only about the stories told in letters, but about the way such letters themselves tell stories.

I hope that gives you some idea of what I’m up to. The book should be published by Arrow in 2010.

Yours faithfully

Sophie Ratcliffe