{"id":479,"date":"2006-12-31T19:40:47","date_gmt":"2007-01-01T00:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=479"},"modified":"2024-02-23T21:16:40","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T02:16:40","slug":"clarke_ladies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/12\/clarke_ladies\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarke, Susanna: (01.5) The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories<\/cite><\/strong> is a collection mostly or entirely [*] set in the same world as her brilliant novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell<\/cite><\/a>. If you liked the novel, you should certainly read this collection. If you haven’t read the novel and are intimidated by its length, I think that using the collection as a sampler is an excellent idea. The prose style and the topics are the same, and even Jonathan Strange appears in the title story. I won’t promise that you’ll like the novel if you like this collection, because the novel is a lot more ambitious; but I think the odds are very good.<\/p>\n

[*] I say “mostly or entirely” because the fictional introduction treats them all as illuminating that same world, but one of the stories is explicitly set in the world of Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s Stardust<\/cite><\/a>, which may or may not fully overlap JS&MN<\/cite>‘s world; and back when I read JS&NM<\/cite>, I thought the story “Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge was Built at Thoresby” wasn’t consistent with it. (I couldn’t defend that conclusion now without a re-read.)<\/p>\n

A few notes on individual stories:<\/p>\n