Malvina of Brittany

Malvina of Brittany is a collection of short fiction by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1916. It belongs to the later part of his career, after the comic boating tours and after his serious play The Passing of the Third Floor Back, and the tone is different from the early humorous work. There is still plenty of humor in the stories, but it is mixed with something more reflective and occasionally strange.

The title story is the longest piece in the book and gives the collection its character. A young aviator crashing his plane in the woods of Brittany discovers a sleeping woman in a dilapidated old cottage, who turns out to be a fairy who has been asleep for centuries. He brings her back to England and the tale follows the social complications that arise from the sudden appearance of an actual immortal at country house parties and London dinners during the early years of the First World War. Jerome plays the situation partly for comedy and partly for a kind of melancholy fable about how shallow modern people seem when measured against something genuinely ancient.

The other stories in the book are shorter and more various. There is a piece about a journalist who can see ghosts but only those of ordinary people, and another about a man who suspects his wife has fallen in love with a fictional character he himself created. Jerome was experimenting in the late period with stories that hovered between comedy and what was then called the weird tale, and Malvina of Brittany is one of the better collections from that period.

The book is one of his less known volumes but has its quiet admirers. It runs about three hundred pages and works as evening reading rather than as a single sitting. For Jerome fans who only know Three Men in a Boat and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, this is the other Jerome, slower and more interior. It pairs naturally with John Ingerfield and Other Stories from 1894, where some of the same odd notes first appeared.