Uneasy Money

‘Uneasy Money’ is an autonomous romantic comedy novel from P.G. Wodehouse, written in 1916 which can be considered one of his best works with his trademark humor and woven plots.

William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Devlish (Bill) is a relaxed, generous, and financially poor member of England's nobility. He marks living as a London club secretary. His beautiful fiancee, Claire Fenwick, will not marry him unless he makes more money. Bill opts to go to America in Hopes of catching it rich.

Just before he sails, Bill is unanticipatedly left million pounds by an American he once helped at golf; the millionaire left his niece and nephew only twenty pounds, which makes him disturbed. He tries to approach them and see if he can fix up something, like giving them half the inheritance. He finds that it can be tough to give money away. This is an outstanding story with all the elements, humor, love, and suspense.

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).