susanna clarke the ladies of grace adieu

Mrs Mabb was both a fairly standard faerie tale of a young man bewitched by the faerie queen, and a tale reminiscent of an Austen story where the virtuous heroine finds her lover has behaved falsely with a rival while she is temporarily out of town. Although the heroine wins out over the faerie in this story, it’s not clear what her ultimate fate will be, as her husband appears to be a violent and unstable man.īoth ‘Mrs Mabb’ and ‘Mr Simonelli or the Fairy Widower’ reminded me of Jane Austen.

The country style of language used by the heroine in this one did make it a little harder to read than the other stories. Enjoyable, but one I’m well familiar with. The next story was basically a clever retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story. The atmosphere Clarke creates in this story is fabulously dark. There is one scene involving owls which is quite creepy and unsettling. The lady in question, Cassandra Parbringer and her two friends, Mrs Fields and Miss Tobias, prove to be highly skilled at magic and appear able to perform quite complex tasks with seeming ease, while simultaneously keeping their powers secret from their male acquaintances. I think the idea is that his mind cannot actually cope with the idea that women are able to understand any magic at all, let alone perform it. Not only does he decide the lady is not suitable, he seems thoroughly put out and unable to cope with what happens. Jonathon Strange leaves London briefly to visit his brother in law and to see if a local lady would make a suitable wife for the brother in law. Except of course that it shows powerful females, and the novel is fairly much the domain of men only. I thought the title story, ‘The Ladies of Grace Adieu’ was the best and could easily have been used as a chapter in the novel.

There is a different faerie aspect to each story.

There is nothing to connect the stories, except for the faerie element, to each. It was more like light froth, entertaining without too much substance. This was a fast read and was entertaining, but I felt it lacked the depth and interest of the novel. The stories are set in much the same world as Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, an England where magic and the faerie realm exist and are accepted as a matter of course. This is a collection of eight short stories written by the author of Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, a novel I read and thoroughly enjoyed a few years ago.

Susanna clarke the ladies of grace adieu