The critics who have written so far about Susanna Clarke’s story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu have returned, by and large, only one verdict. “Well,” they all say shaking their heads, “it is no Strange & Norrell.” This is true. Indeed, there is no disputing it. The studious reader will be able to discern this fact for himself after the careful observation of several facts. The title of the book, for example, is different. It is The Ladies of Grace Adieu: A Collection of Stories and not Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel. The reader will also notice that there are significantly fewer pages in the book, a mere 235, rather than the 800 pages that comprise the author’s first book. Also—although this is not always a reliable indicator—it must be noted that the covers of the two books differ. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell carries the image of a raven upon its front. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by contrast, is decorated with morning glories. 

It was perhaps inevitable, that any book written by the author of so fantastic and ingenious a novel as Strange & Norrell would find itself judged against its predecessor and found wanting. Strange & Norrell stands as a great, shimmering edifice of fiction, so beautifully constructed and so elegantly situated that it invites comparisons to great manor houses crowning windswept hills over commanding views of sweeping moors. One hardly notices the gatekeeper’s cottage at the foot of its ancient graveled drive. Even if it is a beautiful cottage. Even if it is, when compared to other structures of its ilk, as elegant among its kind as the great house is among castles. And really, you know, the author, Ms. Clarke, has no one but her self to blame if her little gatekeeper-cottage collection of stories is forever held up against the castle of Strange & Norrell. It was her preference, after all, to choose as the title story in the collection a tale in which Jonathan Strange deigns to make a cameo appearance (and comes away rather worse for the experience). It was she who chose the artifice of including an “introduction” to the collection written by an academic of the same milieu whose specialty is “Sidhe studies.” So one can hardly blame the reader if he chooses to read the stories as a kind of appendix or addendum to the novel. Nor fault him if he wonders why these stories were not simply tucked in among the multitudinous footnotes already in the novel in the first place—where, one feels assured, they would have been quite at home among the many other fairy tales and stories of magical beings that were so included. A novel which runs to 800 pages is not an exercise in restraint or brevity. Surely an extra hundred pages or so would have made little difference? And one can hardly help admitting, if such is the view one takes, that indeed the original verdict of the critics is a right one: The Ladies of Grace Adieu is no Strange & Norrell.

And yet . . . and yet, here my pen must pause, because I find myself speculating how such a book would fair in a world where no Strange & Norrell existed. Are we able to draw any conclusions of this work upon its own merits, without reference to the author’s other book? How stands The Ladies of Grace Adieu as a simple collection of fairytales?

Well, not so simple, after all.  Since I am one of those who has read and admired the novel I cannot be completely unbiased in my judgment, but I will say that I have a longer experience of reading fairy tales than I do of reading novels by Ms. Clarke. So it was not so difficult, in the end, to push the novel to the back of my mind and read the collection as fairy tales ought to be read—where “once upon a time” begins every tale, and “they lived happily ever after” is its hoped-for conclusion. I am also, at the age of forty, perhaps the last generation whose memories of Cinderella and Snow White are not forever tainted by the abuses of the Disney Corporation (whose minions, I trust, will suffer vastly in the afterlife). No, my understanding of fairy tales comes from the original and very grim Brothers Grimm, and my mother’s old battered copy of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, in which Bluebeard was terrifyingly murderous and Beauty’s Beast was a thing from nightmares.  And I find that when set on a shelf amongst its brethren, The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a very fine addition indeed.

Fairytales are by definition short, predictable and repetitious; the youngest son (or daughter) of three leaves home in search of adventure or treasure, he is kind to small magical animals or old women while upon his journey, and they in turn help him to accomplish some task, and bring home the looked-for treasure or talisman or wife. He returns in triumph, a king, and either awards his worthless and vain elder brothers with kingdoms of their own (in the Disney version) or banishes them forever (if you stick to the original story.)  

There is a deep-seated comfort to this predictability that makes for good a fairy tale but is rather a problem when applied to literary fiction, which demands all sorts of extraneous material such as character development, atmosphere and psychological complexity. Writers who attempt literary renditions of fairy tales usually deal with the inherent simplicity of the story by offering an interpretation of what might have originally happened. Every fairy tale must have a beginning somewhere—a series of events that spawned the first story. Thus, Marion Zimmer Bradley took the Arthurian legends and in The Mists of Avalon spun for us a wholly plausible tale of political and religious struggle in ancient England. Robin McKinley found in the Robin Hood tales a story of reluctant outlaws caught by the net of their own myth which givers her account of The Outlaws of Sherwood great empathy and pathos.

Susanna Clarke takes a rather different tack. She leaves the structure of the fairy tale intact and instead seems to say, “Let us imagine what it would be like to live in an England where magic and faeries exist. What would that feel like?” The answer is engaging, alluring and eerie.  

“The way you know you have stumbled into Faerie,” advised an old collection of Irish fairy tales I used to adore as a child, “is that everything is a little bit more; the sun is a little more bright, the apples more sweet, the women more fair and their white arms more slender and full of grace.”

This description, which I will admit I am paraphrasing because I no longer have the book to hand, has always stayed with me, along with the idea that faerie might be reached, not through some secret door, or  by waving some magic wand, but almost accidentally—a state of existence, a state of consciousness which we might fall in and out of with little warning. It seemed as good an explanation as any for why in certain parts of  my mother’s garden the rest of the world seemed to fall away, or why the moment I flicked off the lights, the stairs leading down to the cellar became a terrifying entrance to dark, unknown places.

I don’t suppose that Susanna Clarke read the same book, but she certainly has the same idea of what faerie might feel like. The men and women in her stories often find themselves wandering in strange woods where no wood should be, entertained at fine houses where only ruins or barrows are known to exist, and treading paths that seem to lead to other destinations in the moonlight than they are wont to do during the day. The heroes and heroines come through their adventures often worse for wear, but also as frequently triumphant as not. The England of the Sidhe is a wild place, but humans are not powerless there. Indeed, a stout human heart seems to be a thing fairies are quite powerless against. But that the wild country of faerie and the orderly one of humans coexist in the same land, with shifting boundaries often marked by nothing more substantial than a hawthorn hedge or a certain vividness of imagination is a fact accepted by all concerned. Even so pragmatic a personage as The Duke of Wellington, having strayed into magic lands, is more than equal to the task of getting himself out again.

The literary complexity in Clarke’s collection comes from this then—not her invention of a realistic story that might have spawned a fairy tale, but her invention of an England in which the fairy tales as we know them could have easily occurred. And let me tell you, her invention is a thing of beauty. The England of Grace Adieu, of Tom Brightwind, of Mrs. Mabb and the Fairy Widower is a seductive place indeed.  

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been called a pastiche of the fiction of Jane Austen’s era. If that is so, then The Ladies of Grace Adieu might be called a pastiche of the Victorian mania for collections of ghost stories. Oh, the language, and the setting of some of the stories remain in the era of Austen—one cannot miss the tribute paid the writer in the story of “Mr. Simonelli or The Fairy Widower,” which begins with a letter the reader will immediately recognize as a copy of Mr. Darcy’s angry letter of justification to the accusations of Miss Elizabeth Bennett (“Madam,” writes the storyteller, “I shall not try your patience by a repetition of those arguments with which I earlier tried to convince you of my innocence.”) Even the stories set in other periods—during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, or the uncertain era supposedly ruled by The Raven King—have an Austen tone to them. But the overall construct of the collection is Victorian, as is the flowery language, the standard characters,  the gothic settings, and the occasional pen-and-ink illustrations by Charles Vess.  The latter immediately put me in mind of a small collection of Victorian poetry (also given to me by my mother) called Silver Pennies which featured poems of fairies and other wee folk, but also of wind, fog and moonlight and ships sailing under dark skies.  

“You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland” states the Blanche Jennings Thompson in her introduction to that small volume, and offers the poems that follow as the pennies required—“frail and exquisite, a mood, a moment of sudden understanding, a cobweb which falls apart at a clumsy touch.”

That book, too, was illustrated, by a forgotten woman named Winifred Bromhall, and you can see why the story fronts of Vess

would remind me of hers.

The illustrations reinforce the Victorian feel of the book, and the sense that it might be discovered not under the bright lights over some store’s bestseller table, but rather lurking like a hidden gem among the other volumes in some small Dickensian bookshop.  

The illustrations are also wholly unnecessary, for there never was a more illustrative writer than Clarke. She does not waste the reader’s time with long internal monologues designed to create well-rounded and interesting psychological depth in her characters. (Such personality as they might possess is easily inferred from their actions.) The solidity, the reality of her fiction comes from this talent to create finely drawn scenes with an economy of words (an economy I suspect hitherto overlooked by those who remain daunted by the 800 pages of her first novel). But I defy the discriminating reader to open to any random point in either book and not, within the space of a paragraph, be shown a scene so vivid and detailed one might be looking at a picture in a gallery, not merely a happy arrangement of words. Hers is no “cobweb to fall apart at a clumsy touch” but a vast and exquisite tapestry done with tight stitches in strong gold thread.

In the end it will be only the unwary fans of Strange & Norrell who will be disappointed by The Ladies of Grace Adieu. The discerning reader will find the collection to be as elegant and pretty a set of stories as ever graced the pages between two covers. And while all those therein might not live happily ever after, the tales themselves are so engaging, so perfectly related, that we don’t quite mind it when the occasional character goes mad.

And for those readers whose resolve faltered at the prospect of reading the 800 pages of Strange & Norrell? Well, The Ladies of Grace Adieu will give you an idea of what you are missing.


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program "Let's Read" on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it