Summer Lightning

"Summer Lightning is a detective story crossed with a romantic farce. It’s set in Blandings Castle, Wodehouse’s famous fictional country idyll. There’s lots going on. We have a pair of star-crossed lovers, a kidnapped pig, a scandalous memoir and slimy private investigator called Pilbeam. Our heroine is Sue Brown, a chorus girl. When people think of Wodehouse’s characters, most of us will think of Bertie, Jeeves or Psmith. But especially in his early writing, like Jill the Reckless or The Adventures of Sally , Wodehouse had a lot of brilliant female characters. He fell in love with someone called Alice Dovey, who wasn’t a chorus girl but a famous actress with a beautiful voice. After she died, he wrote in a letter to her family that all his heroines were more or less modelled on her. But he also drew on his wife Ethel, who was originally an actress, and his step-daughter Leonora whom he adored. So resilient, brave and funny women run through a lot of his fiction. There is also the theme, throughout his work, of needing to do what is called for because you haven’t got much money. That runs through Summer Lightning and is incredibly important to Wodehouse. I think one of the reasons Wodehouse was so driven is because he couldn’t go to Oxford, because his father didn’t have enough money. Many of his characters need money in order to be free to do what they want to do, or to marry the person they want to marry. Yes, he was interested in what he called the “knut” – an Edwardian slang term for a rather idiotic man about town who didn’t have much to do. But he also writes about what happens if the knut runs out of money – if the “family sock” runs a bit short. Also, a lot of his characters aren’t upper class at all but are struggling writers or secretaries or actresses."