My partner and I recently re-watched the BBC miniseries adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and fell in fascination with Susanna Clarke's well-crafted world all over again. When we realized that we'd never read the not-quite-sequel-but-universe-expanding short fictions in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, we picked a copy from the library and dug in. I honestly, perhaps weirdly, liked it better than the original novel.

There's no doubt, in my mind, that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a masterwork. It's a superb love letter and critique of Napoleonic & Austen fiction, academia, and the English identity, down to the spelling. The downside is if a reader occupies one of the "other" identities in those circles (say, a mentally ill bisexual woman like me), the characters most like oneself are dismissed, isolated, and generally trodden upon for 800 pages. Sure, Clarke makes a point about how that's Bad, but goddamn did it become too much sometimes. While Emma, Arabella, Childermass, Stephen et al. do get to directly kill The Gentlemen, the book ends before they get to revel in their reward. Where were the chapters about Stephen's happy, well-run kingship in Faerie; Childermass thriving in his new Yorkshire school and dating Segundus; or Emma, Arabella, & Flora happily not living as widows in Italy?

Well, thematically speaking, that's in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, and I ate it up like pumpkin spice chocolate. I fully understand why Neil Gaiman said he read Clarke's stories and was utterly terrified. I hope to write a great number of novels in my life, and I hope my last one, where I'm at the peak of my writerly powers, can hold a single birthday candle to Ladies, Clarke's second work. Here are the biracial characters, the women who love women and will take no man's nonsense, the Jewish immigrants, the female magicians, and members of the lower classes triumphing over the rich and powerful and being happy. My one quibble would be I wanted a story explicitly about a black or brown person of color, who is connected to communities of color. Stephen's avoidance of other black people as a form of internalized hatred was really, really hard to read in Strange, so it would have been nice to have another story there.

Overall, if you like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell at all, you absolutely must read The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. They're fantastic and brilliant and brilliant in their portrayal of the fantastic.