The Green Mouse

About the book

William Augustus Destyn loses the fortune that supported his comfortable life and must find a use for talents that society previously treated as entertainment. Alongside his skill at conjuring and influencing animals, he has pursued an apparatus concerned with invisible currents of human attraction. Its possibilities give rise to the Green Mouse society and a sequence of romantic complications. Young people who imagine themselves independent of such influences find their conversations and choices moving in unexpected directions. Chambers presents the premise with deliberately elaborate mock-scientific seriousness, making the gap between explanation and flirtation part of the joke. The linked episodes offer a playful comedy of matchmaking, fashionable manners, and the wish to understand love by turning it into a system.

• Attraction and coincidence
• Matchmaking
• Science as comic fantasy

Why read it

Discover Chambers in a light comic mode, using an impossible invention to unsettle romantic self-confidence.

English text of the 1910 comic romance