Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse wrote more than a hundred books and at least twenty film scripts, and he collaborated on more than thirty plays and musical comedies with the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin. Best known as the creator of Jeeves -- the impossibly wise, supremely well-mannered gentleman's gentleman -- and Wooster -- his unflaggingly affable but bumbling employer -- Wodehouse invokes the very British spirit of a bygone era in a gentle satire that, as Evelyn Waugh puts it, "satisfies the most sophisticated taste and the simplest." In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, fate conspires to draw Bertie Wooster back to Totleigh Towers, the site of an earlier ordeal that nearly landed our hero in prison and, worse still, in continuing danger of marriage to Madeline Bassett, the svelte and sadly syrupy daughter of the house. Only one thing stands between Bertie and the dreaded state of matrimony, and that is his good friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, lover of newts and Madeline Bassett. So long as Gussie and Madeline continue to profess their undying love for each other, Bertie is safe...but disaster looms when Gussie rebels at Madeline's attempt to turn him into a vegetarian. Throw in the intrigues of Miss Stiffy Byng and her dog Bartholomew to gain the Reverend Stinker Pinker a vicarage, the renewed rivalry of art collectors Sir Watkyn Bassett and Bertie's Uncle Tom, and the irresistible cooking skills of American Emerald Stoker (who happens to be the younger sister of Bertie's old friend Pauline, whom he also narrowly avoided marrying), and you have trouble of the sort that only Jeeves can mend. In other words, here is a classic version of one of the great plots of the English language from the Master himself.