Short Stories: It can safely be said that when Susanna Clarke's award-winning novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell hit the bookshops in October 2004, most readers were at a loss to describe it. It was a fat book, to say the least, an 800-page doorstop, but what exactly was it? Fantasy? Historical fiction? Gothic whimsy, or Harry Potter for adults?
Reviewers reached for superlative comparisons to pin down Clarke's vast imaginative territory - Jane Austen meets JR Tolkien, military adventure with a distinctly Byronic twist. What was clear was that Clarke had created an original niche in fiction that didn't fit any of the neat categories publishers these days are so keen on.
For readers not familiar with Clarke's work, her fictional territory is a 19th-century world where magic - or should that be Magick? - is a given. In this world, the land of Faerie exists side by side with England - for Clarke is a quintessentially English writer - without any clear distinction. And though her fiction is peopled with goblins and sprites, most of her fairies are indistinguishable from their human counterparts, thus the blurring of the worlds and the ease with which Clarke's heroes and heroines stray into the other side. Escaping, however, is usually not quite so easy. And escape they must for Clarke's otherworld is a drear, wintry and often murderous domain, and certainly no place for the disenchanted.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu is her second outing and comes in a strikingly handsome edition from Bloomsbury - coarse board covers with spot colour and beautiful pen and ink illustrations by Charles Vess. It boasts some of the quirky post-modern tricks of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - the faux scholarly footnotes as well as an introduction and commentary by a professor of Sidhe studies at Aberdeen University - and the stories are presented as if they are a compendium from the pens of different writers. It is this playing with the boundaries that makes reading Susanna Clarke such a playful experience. In this anthology of eight short stories concerning various romps in and morality tales from the world of Faerie, several familiar faces appear. The title story features an unexpected visit from Jonathan Strange, another reprises the Raven King, John Uskglass, who also appeared in Clarke's famous first novel. Austen sleuths will not be disappointed either. In Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower, our hero has to propose to five of the Gathercole girls in turn to save them from the attentions of the evil John Hollyshoes. Said sisters bear more than a passing resemblance to the Bennetts and their mother is as formidable as the matriarch in Pride and Prejudice. The Duke of Wellington also makes an appearance when his horse wanders into the Faerie lands. In trying to recover the beast, he comes up against a Lady of Shalott figure weaving the tapestry of his life, which unfortunately, already includes a scene depicting the imminent moment of his death. Wellington manages to thwart the bewitched woman in the tower but in order to save himself he must unpick all the lady's needlework and set to with his own needle to change his pre-determined end. Mary Queen of Scots is also forced to take up the needle in Antickes and Frets - the only story to stray beyond the 19th century - but all of her fine stitches, as we knowing readers know, fail to save her.
Clarke's talent for pastiche is pitch-perfect and she mixes the comic and the learned with a light hand. If there is one weakness in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, it is the short story format. Unlike the novel, the reader is never allowed to be immersed completely in the world of Faerie and must suspend her disbelief each time she starts a new tale. The clever and tasteful Bloomsbury packaging tries to counteract this but it doesn't quite come off. And for the initiated a word of warning - all of these stories have already been published elsewhere so there's no new work here. For the uninitiated, though, the stories will be as fresh and frothy as the day they were written.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu By Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury, 235pp. £16.99
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic