The Mating Season: Summary & Reading Guide

Five aunts, several disguises and Deverill Hall

The Mating Season begins with the sort of request that makes Bertie Wooster’s loyalty a hazard to himself. Gussie Fink-Nottle needs help, and Bertie agrees to impersonate him at Deverill Hall. The house is occupied by five formidable aunts, and a false identity is a difficult possession to carry through repeated conversations. Romance, family approval and performance all depend on who is believed to be whom. The broad premise sounds like a game, but Wodehouse plays it with great discipline. Every person has a reason to act on the information available to them; Bertie must somehow remember that the information is not what he thinks it is. I find the result one of the most entertaining late expansions of the Jeeves farce.

Impersonation gives the novel a special rhythm. A character enters a room and the reader knows a dangerous fact the other occupant does not. Bertie then has to sustain a role while trying to help the very people whose expectations make the role precarious. The comedy is not merely that he is a poor actor. He can be resourceful, particularly when a friend is in trouble, but every successful exchange postpones the reckoning and may create a more elaborate one. Jeeves sees the entire arrangement at a different scale. His solutions account for identities, motives and timing together. It is a pleasure to watch a plot that could become bewildering remain buoyant because the narrator always makes his immediate fear perfectly clear.

Deverill Hall is nearly a character in its own right. The concentration of aunts means that an awkward meeting can be followed immediately by another, and a private decision has very little time to remain private. Wodehouse’s comic houses are not interchangeable drawing rooms. Brinkley Court in Right Ho, Jeeves centres Aunt Dahlia and her guests; Steeple Bumpleigh in Joy in the Morning spreads trouble across a village; Deverill Hall gathers authority under one roof. The setting changes the mechanics of escape. A reader need not memorise the family tree before starting. Each fresh arrival teaches Bertie, and us, which expectation will now complicate the plan.

Gussie’s position also becomes more interesting if you remember his earlier appearances. He is not an anonymous friend drafted solely to set the disguise in motion. His enthusiasms and romantic concerns already belong to the Jeeves world, so Bertie’s willingness to help has a history. Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright and Esmond Haddock enlarge the field of young people whose happiness depends on negotiating older relatives’ wishes. I recommend following the book’s immediate relationships first and using the character trails afterward. A farce of mistaken identities loses its sparkle if one reads a full solution in advance. The pleasure is to discover how Wodehouse has distributed knowledge and how much work one well-meant substitution can generate.

A useful way to read the novel is to keep an eye on what Bertie believes he can explain later. He often expects that a future conversation will clear up a present misunderstanding. Meanwhile the situation has acquired another witness, another assumption or another plan that relies on the first. That accumulating debt of explanation is the book’s comic currency. Jeeves’s reserve can feel almost unfair when Bertie is struggling, but it preserves the possibility of a solution that does not injure the people Bertie wants to serve. The ending is satisfying because it must release several linked obligations, not simply expose one disguise. I leave the sequence of releases to the book.

The regional publication record is comparatively straightforward, but still worth stating precisely. Herbert Jenkins published the British book in September 1949; Didier published the American book in November of the same year. The annotated source describes the versions as very similar, with some substituted names and familiar differences in spelling and punctuation. That does not mean every line is guaranteed identical. It means a general reader need not fear that the two titles represent fundamentally different novels, while a textual researcher should still name the edition quoted. A condensed Canadian newspaper supplement is a separate version and cannot be silently treated as the full book. Here again the work, its first books and its shorter reprint are distinct records.

This is a novel I would give to a reader who has already enjoyed one or two full-length Jeeves adventures and wants Wodehouse to increase the number of moving pieces. The central role play asks for a little attention, then rewards that attention repeatedly. It is also generous to a reader who comes in cold: Bertie’s predicament is immediately legible, and Jeeves remains the cool centre of gravity. The book’s sophistication is not a barrier erected to keep new readers out. It is the craft that allows so many mistaken assumptions to coexist without collapsing into arbitrary confusion. Wodehouse keeps the social stakes small enough to laugh at and important enough for the characters to care.

I return most often for the contrast between the two men’s ways of moving through Deverill Hall. Bertie is wonderfully exposed. His account gives us the heat of every new alarm and the pleasure of his latest hopeful theory. Jeeves is present as the promise that the story has a shape Bertie cannot yet see. Neither would be as funny without the other. If your shelf order has brought you through the earlier collections and Right Ho, you can enjoy familiar voices working in a bigger contraption. If you start here, simply accept the invitation to Deverill Hall and watch the names carefully. One borrowed identity is quite enough to begin an exceptional amount of Wodehousean trouble.