The Girl on the Boat

About the book

Sam Marlowe meets Billie Bennett aboard a liner and discovers that winning her approval involves living up to an unusually exalted idea of masculine conduct. Other prospective attachments and the difficulties of Sam's cousin Eustace ensure that the voyage contains more than one unstable romance. Wodehouse carries the complications into a country-house setting where schemes, mistaken impressions, and efforts to manufacture a favourable appearance keep interrupting honest communication. The characters' urgency about love is matched by their readiness to believe an implausible plan might settle it. An intrusive, playful narrator helps turn each reversal into a fresh comic performance. The novel's pleasure comes from the disproportion between the simple wish to be admired and the elaborate social machinery set in motion by people trying to guarantee that result.

• Romantic ideals
• Appearance
• Comic schemes

Why read it

For a buoyant Wodehouse romance in which the effort to look heroic reliably produces a new embarrassment.

English text