While Audrey Sheridan is all of these things, she is also a
widow. Between her first courtship with
our hero, Peter Burns, and their reunion a few years later, she had married
some awful man who subsequently shuffled off his mortal coil. Not only has she suffered this loss, but
because of it, Mrs. Sheridan was forced to endure a series of rather trying
jobs to sustain herself. When the reader
hears about her past, there is a real sense of suffering and hardship that has
not been present in any of the other Wodehouse books, even those set in the
depths of the Depression. While other
heroines might have had difficulties in their past, there is a real sense of
melancholy and strife that was completely new to me. Mrs. Sheridan has had a range of experience
uncommon in a Wodehouse female.
I had the opportunity to talk about this with my uncle, the
one who also suffers from a case of Wodehouse-mania. We were feeding my son, who is now a
boisterous two years old, his dinner when I remarked upon my little revelation. The back flap of the Overlook edition has a
brief biography of Wodehouse, and it stated that he married his wife, Ethel
Rowley, in 1914. Coincidentally, this
was also the year of the book’s publication.
I knew that Ethel Rowley was a widow twice-over when she met Wodehouse,
and my uncle filled me in a little more about the unfortunate circumstances
that ended her two previous marriages.
At this point, I was beginning to think that Wodehouse must have created
the character of Audrey Sheridan in honor of Ethel Rowley. Although the book was published in 1913, I reasoned
that they might have met before then and had begun courting when Wodehouse
wrote this book. My uncle agreed that
that might indeed have been the case, and we continued to induce my son and
heir to finish his cottage cheese.
What I had not counted on was the fact that our Plum was a
romantic. There are numerous references
to love at first sight in his novels, and about half of those infatuations
typically end in engagements by the story’s end. It turns out that our hero might have been a
victim of Cupid’s arrow. He met Ethel at
a party that was held on August 3, 1914 and they were married less than two
months later on September 30, 1914.* The
Little Nugget was first published in Munsey’s Magazine in August 1913, a
full year before the meeting. Audrey
Sheridan is not an ode to Ethel Rowley.
I could easily speculate endlessly on the reasons why
Wodehouse assigned a relatively grave background to Mrs. Sheridan. Perhaps as Plum developed his comedic style,
he realized that his ingénues’ lives should not be darkened by a black
cloud. Perhaps he was in some way
affected by the brewing storm that resulted in the outbreak of World War
I. What is without a doubt is that he
does have a delight in using strong female characters, and I will end with a
quotation that I found on page 228 that I found to be particularly lovely:
“Women have the gift of being courageous at times when they
might legitimately give way. It is part
of their unexpectedness.”
*I’ve always wondered about the typical length of courtships
historically. Have they gotten
longer? My parents met and were married
inside of six months 41 years ago and are still going strong. Conversely, the unmitigated disaster that was
my failed marriage was preceded by a two and a half year entanglement.
