2 This is by no means unusual as the following passage from The Modern Magician (Autumn, 1812) shews. “Where is Pale’s house? Where Stokesey’s? Why has no one ever seen them? Pale’s house was in Warwick. The very street was known. Stokesey’s house faced the cathedral in Exeter. Where is the Raven King’s castle in Newcastle? Every one who saw it proclaimed it to be the first house for beauty and splendour in all the world – but has any one ever seen it in the Modern Age? No. Is there any record of it being destroyed? No. It simply disappeared. All these houses exist somewhere, but when the magician goes away or dies, they disappear. He may enter and leave as he pleases, but no one else may find them.”

3 Many of the new magicians applied to Lord Liverpool and the Ministers for permission to go and find Strange and Norrell. Some gentlemen were so thoughtful as to append lists of equipment, both magical and mundane, which they thought they might need and which they hoped that the Government would be kind enough to supply. One, a man called Beech in Plymouth, asked for the loan of the Inniskilling Dragoons.

4 This slander was not entirely discredited until Arabella Strange herself returned to England in early June 1817.

5 There are very few modern magicians who do not declare themselves to be either Strangite or Norrellite, the only notable exception being John Childermass himself. Whenever he is asked he claims to be in some degree both. As this is like claiming to be both Whig and Tory at the same time, no one understands what he means.

A Note on the Author

SUSANNA CLARKE lives in Cambridge with her partner, the novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was published in 2004 in more than thirty countries and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. It won the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award in 2005. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of her short stories, some set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006.

By the Same Author

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Also Available by Susanna Clarke

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Faerie is never as far away as you think. Sometimes you find you have crossed an invisible line and must cope, as best you can, with petulant princesses, vengeful owls, ladies who pass their time embroidering terrible fates or with endless paths in deep, dark woods and houses that never appear the same way twice. The heroines and heroes bedevilled by such problems in these fairy tales include a conceited Regency clergyman, an eighteenth-century Jewish doctor and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as two characters from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: Strange himself and the Raven King.

‘An unholy alliance of Austen and Angela Carter’
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