P. G. Wodehouse
Lord Dawlish is agreeable, well-meaning, and almost completely without money. Then an American millionaire he once helped with a golf problem dies and leaves him a fortune. Most people would consider the matter settled. Bill considers it deeply embarrassing.The inheritance was expected by the millionaire’s niece, Elizabeth Boyd, and Bill cannot escape the feeling that he has benefited at her expense. Determined to give her a substantial share, he travels to the United States to find her. Unfortunately, he does not immediately tell Elizabeth who he really is.From that act of well-intentioned concealment, P. G. Wodehouse builds a romantic comedy of mistaken identity, awkward generosity, money, and increasingly complicated affection. The action moves from England to New York and Long Island, where Bill encounters Elizabeth, her brother Nutty, romantic rivals, financial expectations, and situations that make honesty increasingly difficult.The comedy depends on the contrast between Bill’s decency and his inability to arrange events as neatly as he hopes. Money repeatedly creates problems rather than solving them, while characters misread motives, identities, and one another with the confidence typical of Wodehouse’s comic worlds.First published in book form in the United States in 1916 after beginning serialization in The Saturday Evening Post in 1915, Uneasy Money belongs to Wodehouse’s earlier period and is more openly romantic than many of his later farces. Its pleasures are recognizably his: social comedy, amiable absurdity, misunderstandings, transatlantic contrasts, and a plot that grows more complicated whenever someone tries to simplify it.
