Susanna Clarke’s short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu is best read as a companion to her magisterial Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. In fact, the text itself encourages readers to do just that, with its mock critical apparatus referring to “a somewhat obscure novel published a few years ago” which concerns the 19th-century magicians Strange and Norrell. The book, then, is a collection of stories about Faerie; or, to follow Clarke’s conceit, stories which may shed some light on the history and doings of the Sidhe, and the development of magic, in the British Isles.
What’s immediately noticeable is that most of these stories are about people living on the edges of the society envisioned by Clarke in her novel – briefly, a society where magic is a respectable pursuit only for gentlemen. The central characters of these stories are abandoned gentlewomen, Jewish doctors, impoverished clergymen, servants’ daughters; specifically, they are people whose circumstances bring them close enough to gentility and respectability to be manipulated by it without benefiting from it. Their use of magic, or their alliances with Faerie, gives them access to power that is not determined by their social status, and so undermines and threatens the established order. These are, in other words, unsettling stories: the gap between magical power and social power manifests sometimes as humour, sometimes as something more uncanny; it never sits entirely easy.
It’s a collection that perhaps seems light in comparison with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; but it both fulfils a fannish need for more detail about Clarke’s universe, and has a coherent artistic worldview of its own, and it’s frankly criminal how rarely both things are true of the same work. A book for Strangites and Norrellites both to enjoy.
The English Student 