Jill the Reckless. P.G. Wodehouse. POOTLED.epub

Published 1920.



Jill The Reckless is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on October 8, 1920 by George H. Doran, New York, (under the title The Little Warrior), and in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, on 4 July 1921. It was serialised in Collier's (US) between 10 April and 28 August 1920, in Maclean's (Canada) between 1 August and 15 November 1920, in both cases as The Little Warrior, and, as Jill the Reckless, in the Grand Magazine (UK), from September 1920 to June 1921.



The heroine here, Jill Mariner, is a sweet-natured and wealthy young woman who, at the opening, is engaged to a knighted MP, Sir Derek Underhill. We follow her through financial disaster, an adventure with a parrot, a policeman and the colourful proletariat, a broken engagement, an awkward stay with some grasping relatives, employment as a chorus girl, and of course, the finding of true love.



Other characters include wealthy, dimwitted clubman Freddie Rooke (a precursor of Bertie Wooster), ruggedly attractive writer Wally Mason, both of these childhood friends of Jill's; her financially inept uncle Major Christopher Selby; and Sir Derek's domineering mother, Lady Underhill; Jill's unpleasant relatives in Long Island, New York; Elmer, Julia and Tibby Mariner; Drones Club member Algy Martyn, various chorus girls, composers and other theatrical types, and, of course, miscellaneous servants.



George Bevan, composer hero of Wodehouse's previous work A Damsel in Distress, receives a passing mention, as does an unspecified member of the Threepwood family.



The dust jacket of the UK first edition published by Herbert Jenkins was designed by Edmund Blampied.



Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (/ˈwʊdhaʊs/; 15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English humorist whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, humorous verses, poems, song lyrics, and magazine articles. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years, and his many writings continue to be widely read. A quintessential Englishman, born during the Victorian era and living his early youth in Edwardian London, he also resided in France and the United States for extended periods during his long life. His writing reflects this rich background, with stories set in England, France, and the United States, particularly, New York City and Hollywood.



An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by recent writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry,Douglas Adams,J. K. Rowling,and John Le Carré.



Perhaps best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies, many of them produced in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934), wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote lyrics to Sigmund Romberg's music for the Gershwin – Romberg musical Rosalie (1928) and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.



Wodehouse spent the last decades of his life in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1955, after a controversy arose relating to five radio broadcasts he made from Germany during World War II. He had been imprisoned by the Germans in a civil internment camp for a year, and speculation regarding his motives led to allegations that the broadcasts were the result of collaboration and treason. Some libraries banned his books. An MI5 investigation cleared him of any such crimes, but he never returned to England.



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