Some decisions are made with great seriousness. Others are made, reconsidered, revised, and ultimately regretted—usually by Bertie Wooster. In Bertie Changes His Mind, P. G. Wodehouse explores the delicate art of mental revision under pressure. This time, however, the situation is observed with the calm detachment of Jeeves, who watches his employer's latest conviction shift with alarming speed. Bertie's sudden enthusiasm leads him into a sequence of decisions involving unexpected responsibility and an ill-advised journey to Brighton. Each step forward generates an immediate and elegant reversal. What follows is a familiar well-meaning intentions colliding softly with reality, producing consequences that no one explicitly ordered. A light, perfectly timed comedy of hesitation, where certainty is temporary, and trouble is remarkably persistent under careful supervision.
Author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
