The Adventures of Sally (Mostly Sally)

Like Jill the Reckless, an Anglo-American novel largely about the theatre. American Sally Nicholas has inherited $25,000. She is engaged to a very good-looking English unsuccessful artist, who is a would-be playwright too, Jerry Foster. Her brother Fillmore has also inherited, but his new money makes him fat and pompous. Sally is forgiving of his faults and foolishnesses and encourages the good-hearted and simple Gladys Winch, show girl, to marry Fillmore and look after him. Jerry, like almost all good-looking young men in Wodehouse, is a heel. He married, behind Sally's back, a girl friend of Sally's who has become a rising star in the theatre. The marriage is headed for failure, and Jerry for the bottle. Sally, a game little friend of all the world, has Ginger Kemp as a constant adorer. Ginger is English. He was doing well at Oxford - boxing and rugger blues - when his father 'failed' in business and Ginger had to go and work for his uncle. That was a failure; then schoolmastering, also failure. He meets Sally on the beach at Roville, and stops a dog-fight and asks her to marry him. He follows her to America, and does eventually marry her, when she has lost her money. They set up, happily, a sort of dog-farm which is enjoyable and is going to be successful. Sally rumples Ginger's hair, a sure sign of connubial love and contentment in Wodehouse.

A jerky, choppy book. Mrs Meecher's lodging house in New York is Dickensian. Several short story themes are tied up untidily together, and there is a scrambling of loose ends to finish up.

Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.