The Mating Season by P.D. Wodehouse (1949)

I chose this because it was described as a Jeeves novel, and I never did understand where the Ask Jeeves of early internet days came from. The reading of the book was very rapid and it took me a while to get into the style and language and it was difficult to keep track of all the characters in the beginning. Looks like this book is one of many Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves stories. Bertie narrates this story of mistaken identities and star-crossed lovers, a theme much used in literature, and at time reminding me of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Esmund loves actress Corky, but pretends to like Gertrude, while it seems Corky is falling for Gussie. Gussie loves Madeline but sends Bertie to replace him at a visit to a country home. Catsmeat who actually loves Gertrude comes as Bertie's supposed assistant. And Constable Cobbs loves the butler's daughter Queenie, who for a while seems to be engaged to Catsmeat.

Though Jeeves is asked to solve many a trivial problem, and his richness of knowledge seems to be more at a gossip level, I assume that over all the books he has shown the intelligence that led to attach his name to the Ask Jeeves website.

Though I can't say I am fond of this upper-class life-style, I did find the language of Wodehouse fascinating. Since I listened to the book, I didn't get a chance to jot anything down and we don't own this particular book in our library, but I remember getting a kick out of all the words Wodehouse transformed into verbs, e.g. "center aisleing" was his way of saying "getting married."