Norrell was an Encyclopaedist, Strange a Romantic (Diderot and Coleridge are namechecked in these stories, as they never were in the novel). The eponymous heroes of that novel were both magicians, although sparing in their use of their sensational craft. And, finally, so do several characters familiar to readers of Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the compendious and inventive novel to which these stories bear the same kind of relation that a needlewoman's antickes and frets would bear to her main composition. So do John Aubrey and the first Duke of Wellington, and characters familiar from other literary sources: the Queen Mab whom Mercutio describes so eloquently (here demoted to plain Mrs Mabb, but still fearsomely malicious and as powerful as she is diminutive) Rumpelstiltskin (masquerading - true to form - under an assumed name). The queen makes an appearance in these stories, in which a breach in a wall or a previously unnoticed pathway frequently opens from the world of historical fact into that of fairytale fiction. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other StoriesĪntickes and frets, Susanna Clarke informs us in a footnote (she's a great one for footnotes), are respectively "grotesque figures" and "formal Renaissance devices", both of which are to be found in the decorative borders of embroideries made in the lifetime of Mary, Queen of Scots.
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