WODEHOUSE, P.G. Joy in the Morning.

Completed in Germany

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Joy in the Morning. London: Herbert Jenkins. 1947.

8vo. Publisher’s orange cloth, lettered in black to spine and upper board, illustrated dust-jacket by Frank Ford; pp. 256; jacket clipped, chips to spine ends and corners with loss to lettering at foot, cellotape repairs to verso including tape along front flap hinge where previously detached, boards slightly warped, top right corner of upper board bumped; very good.

First UK edition, first printing of the eighth full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and the ever-resourceful Jeeves.

Bertie is obliged to brave the marital home of his formidable Aunt Agatha and her husband, Lord Worplesdon, where he also finds himself reunited with his former fiancee, Lady Florence Craye.

Wodehouse began writing the novel when he was in Le Touquet, before his internment in France, and completed it in Germany after his wife, Ethel, brought the unfinished manuscript with her to Berlin. Although written against the backdrop of war and internment, the novel remained a source of considerable enjoyment for Wodehouse. As he wrote in a letter to Peter Townend on 3 October 1939: ‘I am well on in a new novel, and enjoying it tremendously, as I feel I can take my time. My only qualms are about how to get more typewriter ribbons’ (Ratcliffe, p. 284).

The novel was first published in the US on 22 August 1946, and the UK edition followed on 2 June 1947.

Mcllvaine A65b. See Ratcliffe ed., P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (2011).

SKU: 2126326