The P G Wodehouse Society (UK) Essay Prize: The Winners

By Anna Sanchez O'Brien, Fergus Butler-Gallie, Dorothy McDowell and Ashley D. Polasek

TSB Can of Worms Press is delighted to announce the publication of an anthology of the winning essays of the inaugural P G Wodehouse Society (UK) essay prize.
"Only Shakespeare has more original citations than Wodehouse in the Oxford English Dictionary" TIM ANDREW Chairman, The P G Wodehouse Society Step into the world of Wodehouse with these prize-winning essays.The essay competition was launched to encourage academic interest in and a wider acknowledgement of the cultural significance of Wodehouse's works. The contest received over 50 entries from all over the world, including entrants in both its senior and junior prizes. With the judging panel chaired by Sophie Ratcliffe – Oxford professor, writer, critic, and editor of P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters– and with a highly esteemed panel of judges including Stephen Fry, the selected essays were well-chosen from an impressive stack of high-quality pieces. The published essays are varied in topic and comprise of an honourable mention arguing that Galahad Threepwood can be seen as a gay icon, an honourable mention applauding the multimedia adaptations of A Damsel in Distress, a winning junior entry arguing why Jeeves and Wooster should be introduced to YA audiences, and a winning adult entry which describes the night as a character in its own right within Wodehouse stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TSB
• Release date: Jun 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781911673460

Book preview

essay-prize-front-cover.jpgessay-prize

The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

Essay Prize: The Winners

© 2024

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First published by TSB, 2024

TSB is an imprint of:

Can of Worms Enterprises Ltd

7 Peacock Yard, London SE17 3LH

United Kingdom

www.canofworms.net

The Reasons Why Stories of Jeeves and Wooster

Should Be Introduced to Young Adult Audiences

© Anna Sanchez O’Brien, 2024

The Hour Breeds Thought – Night Time in the Stories of PG Wodehouse

© Fergus Butler-Gallie, 2024

The Last of the Pelicans: Galahad Threepwood as Gay Icon

© Dorothy McDowell, 2024

Wodehouse Adapting Wodehouse: A Damsel in Distress Across Media

© Ashley D. Polasek, 2024

The moral rights of Anna Sanchez O’Brien, Fergus Butler-Gallie, Dorothy McDowell, and Ashley D. Polasek to be identified as the authors of their respective works, as above, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover design and typesetting: James Shannon

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Severn, Gloucester, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Introduction by Tim Andrew

Chairman, The P G Wodehouse Society (UK

Winning Young Adult Entry by Anna Sanchez O’Brien: The Reasons Why Stories of Jeeves and Wooster Should Be Introduced to Young Adult Audience

Winning Adult Entry by Fergus Butler-Gallie: The Hour Breeds Thought – Night Time in the Stories of PG Wodehouse

Adult Entry (Honourable Mention) by Dorothy McDowell: The Last of the Pelicans: Galahad Threepwood as Gay Icon

Adult Entry (Honourable Mention) by Ashley D. Polasek: Wodehouse Adapting Wodehouse: A Damsel in Distress Across Media

Introduction

This book contains the winning entries in the senior and junior competitions, plus the senior honourable mentions, in the first P G Wodehouse Society (UK) essay competition. The competition was launched at the end of 2021 because we wanted to encourage serious academic interest in PGW’s writing.

To most people Wodehouse is the creator of Jeeves and Wooster. To many he is a humourist who specialised in silly ass characters. To a large part of the academic establishment he is – I suspect in my more paranoid moments – dismissed as lightweight, perhaps because he had no message: his intention was purely to entertain.

Yet, not only was he a supreme artist in words and one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century, but even more than that, he remains a significant figure in the wider culture of the English-speaking world, with his influence on musical theatre, his plays and his other writing. Only Shakespeare has more original citations than Wodehouse in the Oxford English Dictionary. Wodehouse has long been admired by other writers, including the most ‘serious’. People who have never heard of Wodehouse have their everyday language influenced by him. All this is implicitly acknowledged by the placing of a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey in September 2019.

We decided it was time that his literary and wider cultural significance was more widely acknowledged, and so we launched the essay competition, albeit with some trepidation: What, we asked ourselves, if nobody enters? Well, the number, the high quality and the astonishing range of entries showed us that we should not have worried: they came, literally, from all over the world. There were more than 50 entries, and we were particularly pleased that seven of them were in the junior section.

The range can be summarised by the shortlist, in which one argued that Wodehouse was against modernism in literature and another that he was actually a kind of modernist. One of the essays awarded an honourable mention argued that Galahad Threepwood can be seen as a gay icon and the other showed that far from working only on the page, PGW’s plots work just as well on stage and on the screen, as A Damsel in Distress demonstrates. The winner considered the role of night in Wodehouse’s plots and concluded that the night became a character in its own right. The judges had a very difficult job.

I should like to thank all who made the competition not only possible but such a success: the Society subcommittee, Jo Jacobius and Paul Kent; the panel of judges, Paula Byrne, Stephen Fry, Patrick Kidd, Elliott Milstein, Cat White and, especially, Professor Sophie Ratcliffe who chaired the judging panel and did so much to shape this first venture for the Society; and above all, the entrants, who clearly put a huge amount of thought, care, time and enthusiasm into their entries.

I hope this book not only brings as much pleasure to those who read it as the entries did to the judges, but that it also encourages those who look at the work of PG Wodehouse and see that in his writing there is fertile ground for academic interest.

And finally, thank you to Tobias Steed and TSB | Can of Worms, the publishers. Without you, this book would be impossible.

Tim Andrew

Chairman

The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

Winning Young Adult Entry

by Anna Sanchez O’Brien

The Reasons Why Stories of Jeeves and Wooster Should Be Introduced to Young Adult Audiences

If a young someone were to go into a bookshop, they would see a large metaphorical and literal distance between the sprawling young adult section and the shelf in