French Leave: Summary & Reading Guide

Three sisters leave Long Island for a French resort

Three American sisters leave their chicken farm on Long Island for a European holiday. At St. Rocque in France they encounter the penniless Marquis de Maufringneuse, his son Jeff, a writer, and the marquis’s formidable American former wife. One visitor wants a husband, the marquis needs a fortune and Jeff is seeking love. The resort gathers these intentions in one place and gives each traveller the chance to misunderstand what another is doing there. I enjoy the book’s holiday energy: crossing an ocean permits new possibilities, but it does not erase the habits and financial needs everybody brings along.

The sisters’ farm is an important point of departure. They are Americans with a working enterprise behind them, not a trio of anonymous heiresses arriving solely to be courted. A French resort offers a very different social setting, where a marquis may look impressive even while short of money. His title and his need for funds are both real within the story. Wodehouse can make the attraction of a glamorous holiday and the practical calculation behind a match occupy the same conversation. The holidaymakers’ decisions matter because each has a life to return to if the proposed adventure proves less appealing than advertised.

Jeff’s writing gives him a different interest from his father’s search for solvency. A writer may see the world around him as material, yet must still meet a person as herself rather than as the convenient answer to a plot. The marquis’s ex-wife knows enough about him to puncture any overly romantic picture of the title. That history gives the group more than a simple opposition between Americans and French people. They are connected through family, money, former marriage and new courtship. I like the way the resort can hold all those claims while each participant tries to present a coherent public face.

French Leave is also a work with a substantial life before this Wodehouse novel. It novelises Guy Bolton’s stage play Three Blind Mice. The play had already been filmed as Three Blind Mice in 1938, Moon over Miami in 1941 and Three Little Girls in Blue in 1946, and transformed into the 1940 stage musical Walk with Music. These works should be described as earlier adaptations of Bolton’s play, not film versions of a Wodehouse book that did not appear until the 1950s. Keeping that sequence straight is a useful service to readers following the name across media.

Herbert Jenkins published the UK first book on 20 January 1956. Simon and Schuster brought out the US first edition on 28 September 1959, a noticeably longer regional interval than many Wodehouse novels have. A shortened Canadian newspaper version appeared in September 1955, and a British John Bull serial followed before the first book. A serial in 1955 does not make the US 1959 book a 1955 edition. The multiple dates are best presented as a timeline of formats, and the original Bolton play deserves its own attribution alongside that timeline.

The setting at St. Rocque gives Wodehouse room for entrances that might be unlikely on the Long Island farm. Travellers can arrive with ambitions they have kept quiet at home; a title can open doors; an old spouse can make an unexpected appearance and change the meaning of a new conversation. The sisters are choosing how to spend a holiday, while the marquis sees a possible solution to a financial problem. When the same meeting means romance to one person and rescue to another, the comic difficulty is ready. The author keeps the atmosphere light even as these mismatched expectations grow.

A title such as French Leave can suggest an unexplained departure, and there are plenty of reasons for a character to wish to escape an awkward scene. The book’s particular flavour, however, comes from the American sisters taking leave of their familiar farm life and entering a concentrated European social circle. I return for the contrast between the marquis’s polished surface and his need, Jeff’s more personal hopes, and the ex-wife’s capacity to recall what other people would prefer to forget. Their encounters reward attention without requiring a study of the prior play.

Choose French Leave for a late Wodehouse resort comedy with American and French interests set against one another. You can read the novel on its own, then explore Bolton’s Three Blind Mice and its earlier films if the transformation interests you. Keep the credits and chronology separate: this 1956/1959 book follows those stage and screen works. The immediate pleasure is the holiday company, the three sisters’ different prospects and the sight of a distinguished title trying to find a solvent future in the company of people who have plans of their own.

Adaptation chains can easily reverse themselves in a short summary. Here the play came first; the three named films and musical derive from that stage material; Wodehouse’s prose followed later. A reader seeking the 1938 film should not expect a screen treatment of passages from the 1956 novel. The shared characters and premise explain the family resemblance, while the credits and dates identify each separate work. That clarity makes browsing the shelf far more rewarding.