Honeysuckle Cottage

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"Honeysuckle Cottage"
Author P. G. Wodehouse
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s) Comedy
Publisher Saturday Evening Post (US)
Strand (UK)
Media typePrint (Magazine)
Publication date24 January 1925 (US)
February 1925 (UK)

"Honeysuckle Cottage" is a short story by the British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse. The story was first published in the 24 January 1925 issue of the Saturday Evening Post in the United States and in the February 1925 issue of the Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom. [1] It also appears in the collection Meet Mr. Mulliner . [2]

Short story work of literature, usually written in narrative prose

A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood, however there are many exceptions to this.

P. G. Wodehouse English author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school, he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction, creating several regular characters who became familiar to the public over the years. They include the jolly gentleman of leisure Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.

Contents

Wodehouse subsequently added a framing device in which the story is told by the character of Mr. Mulliner. It is this version which appears in the 1927 short story collection Meet Mr. Mulliner , and subsequent Wodehouse collections.

Mr. Mulliner is a fictional character from the short stories of P. G. Wodehouse. Mr. Mulliner is a loquacious pub raconteur who, no matter what the topic of conversation, can find an appropriate story about a member of his family to match it.

Rated by Wodehouse himself as one of his funniest stories, [3] the story has been viewed as a homage to the writer Henry James. [4] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought it the funniest thing he had ever read, and it has been suggested – not entirely seriously – that it influenced Wittgenstein's own thought. [5]

Henry James American writer and literary critic

Henry James was an American-British author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian-British philosopher

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

Plot

When the hardboiled mystery novelist, James Rodman, a distant cousin of Mr. Mulliner, receives an inheritance from his aunt, Leila J. Pinckney, a romance novelist, along with the condition that he stay for six months in Honeysuckle Cottage, where she wrote nine million one hundred and forty thousand words of glutinous sentimentality. James moves to the cottage to write in peace, but he soon finds a damsel in distress intruding into his writing, a thing he had studiously avoided until now. And then, a real girl arrives in the form of Rose Maynard, who is injured when struck by a car outside the cottage gates. When even Rodman's tough literary agent is mellowed by the atmosphere of the house, James knows that fate, in true romance-novel form, is inexorably urging him on to propose to Rose. A confirmed bachelor, he struggles against this unwelcome fate and is saved by the timely intervention of a mixed-breed dog.

Publication history

The story was published in The Saturday Evening Post with illustrations by George Wright. [6] Treyer Evans illustrated the story in the Strand. [7] The story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (US) in December 1958. [8]

<i>The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction</i> digest magazine

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Fantasy House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first issue was titled The Magazine of Fantasy, but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. F&SF was quite different in presentation from the existing science fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single column format, which in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley "set F&SF apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine".

"Honeysuckle Cottage" was collected in the Mulliner Omnibus, published in 1935 by Herbert Jenkins Limited, and in The World of Mr. Mulliner, published in the UK in 1972 by Barrie & Jenkins and issued in the US by the Taplinger Publishing Company in 1974. [9] It was included in the 1978 collection Vintage Wodehouse, edited by Richard Usborne and published by Barrie & Jenkins. [10]

Richard Alexander Usborne, or simply Dick Usborne, was a journalist, advertising executive and author. He is widely regarded as the leading scholar of the life and works of British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975).

It was included in the anthology My Funniest Story: An Anthology of Stories Chosen by Their Own Authors, published by Faber and Faber, London, in 1932. [11] It was also included in the anthology The Book of Laughter, published by Allied Newspapers, Manchester, in 1938, along with another Wodehouse story, "Jeeves and the Kid Clementina". [12]

"Jeeves and the Kid Clementina" is a short story by P. G. Wodehouse, and features the young gentleman Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. The story was published in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in January 1930, and in Cosmopolitan in the United States that same month. The story was also included as the seventh story in the 1930 collection Very Good, Jeeves.

Adaptations

"Honeysuckle Cottage" was adapted for radio by Andrew Seacombe and aired on 1 January 1957 on the BBC Home Service. The cast included Robin Bailey as James Rodman, Olive Gregg as Rose Maynard, Arthur Ridley as Dr Brady, Brewster Mason as Mr McKinnon, Michael Shepley as Colonel Carteret, and Bryan Powley as William, the dog. The producer was H. B. Fortuin. [13]

The story was adapted as a radio drama as part of a radio series of Mulliner stories dramatised by Roger Davenport and directed by Ned Chaillet, with Richard Griffiths as Mr Mulliner. The episode aired on 29 April 2002 on BBC Radio 4. The cast also included Matilda Ziegler as Miss Postlethwaite and Rose, Peter Acre as a Port and Dr Brady, Martin Hyder as a Light Ale and McKinnon, David Timson as a Pint of Stout and Colonel Carteret, and Tom George as a Small Bitter and James. [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

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References

Notes
  1. ↑ Midkiff, Neil (3 July 2019). "The Wodehouse short stories". Madame Eulalie. Retrieved 15 September 2019.
  2. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 53–54, A38.
  3. ↑ Wodehouse, P. G. (1953). Performing Flea. London: Herbert Jenkins.
  4. ↑ Wernsman, Marijane R. Davis (Winter 2005). "The Figure in the Carpet of "Honeysuckle Cottage": P. G. Wodehouse and Henry James". The Henry James Review . 26 (1).
  5. ↑ http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2006/07/10/wodehouse-and-wittgenstein/#comment-35563
  6. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 157, D59.65.
  7. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 184, D133.114.
  8. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 152, D39.2.
  9. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), pp. 115–116, B5.
  10. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 124, B19.
  11. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 196, E80.
  12. ↑ McIlvaine (1990), p. 194, E20.
  13. ↑ "Robin Bailey and Michael Shepley in 'Honeysuckle Cottage'". BBC Genome. BBC. 2019. Retrieved 3 September 2019.
  14. ↑ "Meet Mr Mulliner". BBC Genome. BBC. 2019. Retrieved 3 September 2019.
Sources


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