Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in 2004 after ten years of writing, and the novel was recognized immediately as something extraordinary. It won the Hugo Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award and made its author, briefly, the most discussed debut novelist in English. Clarke had written a book that was simultaneously a work of meticulous historical fiction set in Regency England, a novel about the nature of magic and its relationship to English national identity, and a formal exercise in Victorian prose style that was not pastiche but genuine creative achievement. It is one of the most fully realized fantasy novels ever written.

Two Magicians

Gilbert Norrell is the only practicing magician in England. He has spent decades accumulating books of magic and hoarding magical knowledge, and when he finally emerges to offer his services to the English government during the Napoleonic Wars, he does so with the intention of controlling how magic is practiced and by whom. He is brilliant, selfish, timid, and one of the more compelling antagonists in contemporary fiction – all the more so because he is not quite a villain.

Jonathan Strange arrives as Norrell’s pupil and quickly surpasses him. He is generous, adventurous, impulsive, and more gifted than he knows. The two men work together, fall out, and eventually come into opposition over the deepest questions of what English magic is and where it comes from – specifically, from the Raven King, a half-human, half-faerie figure who ruled northern England in the Middle Ages and whose return, or whose refusal to return, underlies the entire plot.

The Footnotes

One of the novel’s most distinctive features is its apparatus of footnotes – hundreds of them, running sometimes for pages, describing the history of English magic, the careers of historical magicians, the geography of Faerie, and the scholarship that exists within the novel’s world. The footnotes are not supplementary; they are part of the novel’s essential texture, and readers who skip them miss a substantial portion of what Clarke is doing.

The footnotes create the impression of a vast, self-consistent world with a history that precedes and extends beyond the events of the novel. They also function as a kind of commentary on the main narrative – sometimes ironic, sometimes elegiac, sometimes providing information that the main characters lack. Clarke spent years writing them, and they show.

The English and Their Magic

The novel is centrally concerned with what magic means to the English – what they have done with it, why they lost it, and what it costs to recover it. Norrell’s magic is theoretical, restrained, respectable; he is the magician as professional, as establishment figure, as someone who wants magic to be accepted by polite society on polite society’s terms. Strange’s magic is more instinctive, more dangerous, and more connected to the wild northern tradition of the Raven King that Norrell fears.

Clarke is doing something serious and specifically English with this opposition. The tension between institutional magic and wild magic, between the desire to make the uncanny respectable and the uncanny’s resistance to respectability, maps onto a set of English cultural anxieties that the novel illuminates without reducing to allegory.

The Faerie World

The gentleman with the thistledown hair – an unnamed faerie who enters the narrative early and causes most of its disasters – is one of fiction’s great villains. He is beautiful, capricious, utterly indifferent to human suffering, and impossible to reason with because his values are simply different from human values in ways that cannot be negotiated. His presence in the novel introduces a genuine uncanniness that the human characters cannot manage or contain, and the damage he causes is proportionally complete.

Clarke’s Faerie is drawn partly from English folklore tradition and partly from her own imagination, and it functions as a genuine alternative reality rather than a decorated human space. The rules of Faerie, when they become apparent, are internally consistent and consistently disturbing.

Clarke’s Prose

The prose in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a sustained performance: Clarke writes in a style modeled on nineteenth-century English prose – Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope – that is deliberately archaic without being imitation. The long sentences, the ironic narrative voice, the particular way the narrator comments on its characters and their world – all of these are Clarke’s own inventions within a historical mode. The style is not a costume; it is the right form for the material.

The book is 782 pages long, and it earns every one of them. Clarke never pads, never repeats, and manages the pacing of a very long narrative with the confidence of a writer who has thought carefully about what should come when and why.

A Singular Achievement

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell belongs to a small group of genre-crossing novels – works that use the materials of popular fiction (magic, alternate history, adventure) to do things that literary fiction aspires to but rarely achieves: a fully realized world, a complex moral landscape, prose that rewards close reading. Clarke followed it in 2020 with Piranesi, a much shorter novel equally remarkable in its own way. Both are essential reading for anyone interested in what imaginative fiction can do.

Do I need to read the footnotes?

Yes. Clarke considers the footnotes integral to the novel, not supplementary, and readers who skip them miss substantial content – history, comedy, characterization, and world-building that does not appear in the main text. They can be slow going on a first pass; some readers find it easier to skim them on a first reading and read them more carefully on a second. But treating them as optional is a mistake: the footnotes are part of what the novel is, and they contain some of Clarke’s finest writing.

Is the novel fantasy or literary fiction?

Both, in ways that cannot be separated. Clarke uses the materials of fantasy – magic, faeries, an alternate history – but constructs them with the formal ambitions of literary fiction: precise prose, complex characterization, historical research, thematic depth. The novel does not ask permission to be in both categories simultaneously, and most readers who engage with it on its own terms find the category question irrelevant. It is a novel about magic that is also a novel about England, about learning, about the nature of art – and it happens to be very long and to contain footnotes.

How long does it take to read?

The novel is 782 pages in most editions, and its prose style is deliberately unhurried. Most readers who engage with it fully report taking two to four weeks. It is not a novel to read quickly; the footnotes, the slow build of the world, the accumulation of detail – all of these require and reward patience. Readers who try to read it at the speed they read thrillers will find it frustrating; readers who let Clarke set the pace tend to find it entirely absorbing.

Who is the Raven King?

John Uskglass, the Raven King, ruled the north of England for three hundred years after negotiating a place for himself between the human world and Faerie. He is the source of English magic as the novel imagines it, and his long absence – he disappeared centuries before the novel begins – is the condition that allows both Norrell’s institutional magic and Strange’s wilder approach to exist as they do. Whether he will return, what his return would mean, and what English magic owes to his legacy are the novel’s deepest questions. Clarke answers them in ways that are surprising and, on reflection, exactly right.

What is the gentleman with the thistledown hair?

He is a faerie, unnamed throughout the novel, who becomes entangled in English affairs when Norrell summons him and makes a bargain he does not fully understand the terms of. The gentleman is not evil in any conventional sense; he is simply a being with values so different from human values that he cannot be reasoned with or appealed to on human terms. He is beautiful, powerful, and genuinely dangerous, and Clarke renders him without condescending to him – his perspective, when we glimpse it, is internally coherent. He is one of the most memorable figures in contemporary fantasy.

Is the novel funny?

Consistently. Clarke’s ironic narrator has perfect comic timing, and the collision between the serious self-importance of the magicians – especially Norrell – and the actual behavior of the magical world around them generates sustained comedy that does not undermine the novel’s seriousness. The social satire of Regency England is Austenian in its precision; the comedy of scholarly obsession is both loving and merciless. The novel is not a comedy, but it is funnier than most novels that are.

How does the BBC adaptation compare to the book?

The 2015 BBC miniseries, written by Peter Harness and starring Eddie Marsan and Bertie Carvel, is widely considered one of the better literary adaptations of the period. It captures the visual world of the novel with care and the two central characters with considerable accuracy. What it cannot reproduce is the footnote apparatus, the ironic narrative voice, or the sheer weight of accumulated historical detail. The adaptation is worth watching for readers who love the novel; it is not a substitute for the novel for any reader.

What should I read after this novel?

Clarke’s second novel, Piranesi (2020), is a completely different book – short, mysterious, set in a world of infinite halls and statues – and equally brilliant. For the tradition of English magic-as-literary-fiction, readers might also consider Alan Garner’s early work, Diana Wynne Jones, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. For the specifically Victorian prose style Clarke inhabits, readers interested in the originals might turn to Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell. For alternate history with comparable ambition, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy offers the closest parallel in terms of historical research and formal ambition.