Summer Moonshine: Summary & Reading Guide

The least desirable house and the most complicated sale

Sir Buckstone Abbot owns Walsingford Hall, a stately home he would dearly like to sell. It is expensive to maintain and notably unattractive, so he has taken in paying guests while he searches for an escape. Princess Dwornitzchek, an American heiress, may be willing to buy. The apparent solution runs straight into a romantic tangle: the princess is engaged to Adrian Peake, Sir Buckstone’s daughter Jane is pursuing Adrian, and playwright Joe Vanringham loves Jane. I like the way the practical problem of an unwanted building becomes inseparable from the wishes of everyone around it.

A grand house usually signals security in a country-house comedy. Walsingford Hall offers the reverse: its owner must find guests and a buyer to keep his finances from worsening. Sir Buckstone’s sporting memoirs have also brought trouble with a publisher. Those details make his enthusiasm for a prospective sale understandable without requiring the reader to share his judgment of the buyer. A house that seems magnificent to an outsider can be a burden to the person who pays its bills. Wodehouse turns that divergence into a source of both sympathy and awkward negotiation.

The princess’s purchase is complicated by her engagement. Adrian does not exist in the plot merely to approve a property transaction; Jane’s pursuit of him and Joe’s devotion to Jane put every apparent agreement under emotional pressure. A business opportunity may advance or collapse because someone changes their mind about a partner. That is the special comedy of the book’s arrangement. Sir Buckstone wants to close a sale, but the young people cannot be placed in a sensible order for his convenience. The prospect of money draws them together, while romance makes the resulting arrangement difficult to sustain.

Prudence Whittaker, Sir Buckstone’s well-spoken secretary, belongs in the picture too. A secretary can know the state of the household and its dealings more intimately than guests who are nominally more important. Her presence gives the social structure another angle of view. The paying guests likewise expose the difference between a private home and an establishment obliged to accommodate strangers. Wodehouse uses that uneasy combination to bring visitors close enough to overhear one another’s plans. The Hall is not an idyllic retreat from commerce: commerce is what keeps its doors open.

The first book edition appeared in the United States on 8 October 1937 from Doubleday, Doran. Herbert Jenkins published the British edition on 11 February 1938. Readers had already seen a Saturday Evening Post serial, and the British Pearson’s serial overlapped the run-up to book publication. The order matters if a catalogue calls this a 1938 novel without acknowledging the 1937 American first. Both dates are true of their respective book editions. The serial dates are another question again and should not silently replace either record.

The title suggests a soft, warm comedy, and the story gives us summer visits, engagements and a house that must somehow find its next owner. Yet its financial pressure keeps the sunshine from turning everything effortless. Sir Buckstone cannot simply decide to keep the Hall and enjoy the landscape. The princess’s possible purchase could answer his problem at the cost of entangling several people’s desires. Joe’s profession as a playwright places another creative worker among the people calculating their futures. Their lives do not line up neatly with an estate agent’s preferred order of operations.

This is a good example of Wodehouse making a building a comic engine. The Hall’s ugliness is amusing, but its continuing cost gives every decision weight. A potential buyer’s arrival changes how the household speaks and behaves; an engagement changes whether the sale looks promising; a guest can discover that the promised pleasant stay is crowded with other people’s plans. I return for the gap between Sir Buckstone’s relief at the sight of an heiress and the reader’s awareness that the heiress has an entire romantic life which will not simplify his transaction.

Read Summer Moonshine when you want a standalone country-house story with an unusually unromantic view of property ownership. The house needs rescue, but the people must sort out their own attachments. The publication sequence is easy to label once the US first and UK first are kept separate. I enjoy Jane and Joe’s place in the tangle, the princess’s power to alter the household’s future, and Sir Buckstone’s longing to be rid of the very possession other people might envy. The eventual untangling is best allowed to come at Wodehouse’s pace.

A reader might expect a buyer to see through a seller’s optimistic account of an ugly property. Wodehouse has richer business in mind: the buyer’s own position is changing while the seller courts her. Each person who might settle the matter is drawn into another person’s romance or financial worry. That is why the Hall remains memorable. It is less a backdrop than a stubborn object whose future everybody tries to fit around a moving set of human wishes.