The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories - Reception

Reception

Published in October 2006, the collection received many positive reviews, though some critics compared the short stories unfavorably with the highly-acclaimed and more substantial Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004). Karen Luscombe of The Globe and Mail called the collection "mesmerizing". She praised the tone of the collection, describing it as "delicious macabre ... exquisitely balanced by an equally delectable sense of satire". For example, a magician tries to find a spell "for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society" but cannot find one. However, Graham Joyce of The Washington Post complained that while Jonathan Strange "was celebrated for its literary touch and its filigree attention to detail", The Ladies of Grace Adieu lacks of the "density" of the novel and "without the scope and the escapist hermetical seal of Strange & Norrell, the stories become suddenly exposed as light-as-a-feather whimsies". She furthered criticized the characters' asexuality and "emotionally disengage", arguing that "there is a kind of darkness, but there is no shadow." In her review in Strange Horizons, Hoyle agreed with Joyce's general review, writing "the stories ... are consistently subtle and enchanting, and as charismatic as any reader could wish, but, while the collection has the panache of the novel, it lacks its glorious self-possession." In the end, she said that:

we would be best to read these stories as a series of extended footnotes, the kind for which Clarke is famous. They continue to play on the riffs—of Faerie, power, and gender—that were established in her novel, but really, they're something else, a sideline in storytelling and representative of Clarke's much wider interests as a writer of English mythology and folklore.