I’ve had two vastly different experiences with Susanna Clarke’s work. Reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell essentially put me off ever joining a book club but Piranesi is one of my favourite books. So I wasn’t sure where I would land when reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu but I came across this gorgeous copy at a library book sale and had to bring it home. Look at that cover!
One of the major differences between Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and Piranesi is simply the size of the two books. So this being a short story collection boded well. It is a short story collection set within the world and history of Jonathan Strange. It has also been more than 15 years since I read that book and I remembered very little about it. Only one story in The Ladies of Grace Adieu features Jonathan Strange as a character and it wasn’t hard to figure out who he was and what was going on, even without much memory of the book.
This is simply a collection of stories that is set in a world where magic and fairies and magicians are real. Fairy kings exist alongside the regular farmers and housewives of Victorian England, a sort of tenuous peace between the two, even as they hold to very different rules. The stories read to us like fairytales (indeed one is very similar to the story of Rumplestiltskin) but are told to the reader as historical anecdotes. At the same time, there is always the sense of the unreal. The human characters live in a world of magic but don’t always understand what is happening to them as such. I feel like if I lived in a world where fairies were real, I would blame everything on them. Can’t find your keys? Fairies took ’em. Kids particularly crabby today? Probably swapped by fairies. It wasn’t clear to me in every story how much the average person understood about the magical world existing alongside their own.
I did feel like there were probably some references to the elaborate world and history that Clarke created in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that I missed. If you loved that book, I’m sure you will love this collection and delight in the world-building and connections that can be found here. However, if you felt so-so on that tome or even if you haven’t read it but enjoy a good fairy story, I still think you’ll have some fun here.
Karissa Reads Books 
I loved both JS&MN and Piranesi, but was very disappointed by her recent short story The Wood At Midwinter; this sounds better, more focused, and like the stories are actually stories (the thing that let The Wood… down was that it more or less ended at the point where it should have dug in).
I think you would enjoy this collection. I agree about The Wood at Midwinter, it felt truncated.
[…] The Ladies of Grace Adieu & Other Stories – Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2006) […]
I remember when I was an undergrad and it was practically a meme to hear professors say things like, “Print out your paper and then proofread it, so you can avoid the computer goblins.” We used to say that a lot, lol. Now, we do not, but I still don’t know how many folks actually print and then proofread their work. Probably not many because I know both Word and Docs have grammar catchers that alert you to mistakes. Strangely, they don’t catch the same stuff, so I would write a paper in one, copy and paste it to the other, and get all the mistakes.
Also, you cannot drop a like like “essentially put me off ever joining a book club” and then not tell us what happened!
That’s a good point! How do students do it now? The program grammar catchers can help but they’re definitely not 100% accurate.
I feel like I shared this story before but maybe not here. Years ago, several of my coworkers and I decided to start a book club and we picked Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Not my first choice but I was fine with it. The book is enormous and I struggled to finish it and did not really enjoy it but of course had to read it all for book club. Turns out, we get together on the planned date and I am the only one who read the book! I felt like I’d wasted so much reading time! And then because we had no book to discuss and clearly hadn’t chosen well, that was the only book club meeting we ever had. Total flop.
Currently I have a friend/co-worker with similar reading tastes so pretty frequently we end up reading the same book and then go out for a drink and talk about it. That’s my kind of book club!
Your two-person book club sounds a lot like what my mom and I do. Sometimes I enjoy more people in the group; other times, I have to hold in my shouty demons that want to shake the people who “liked it” or “didn’t like it.” Also, that’s so sad that no one else in your coworker book club spoke up and just said, “This ain’t working.” The group could have had a good laugh and chosen a different book.
Yeah, it is disappointing looking back because I think it could have been a good group. It was definitely a group that needed someone to take charge.
I used to be in a book club that had no leader. I just think that’s absolutely the worst because there was a whole lot of introverted, hemming and hawing.
I don’t want to lead a book club but I also don’t want to be in a leaderless book club but I also wouldn’t want just anybody being the leader.
Well that sounds like a conundrum.
I’ve never heard of these books or this author, so I must be totally out of the loop on this one! Fairy stories aren’t usually my thing but the cover of this is so gorgeous, I totally get why you picked it up!
Isn’t it a great cover? I was already interested in reading it when I saw it at the library sale but that cover clinched it!