In the first version of A Year and a Day, it’s revealed that Emily is a fan of Rosie M. Banks’ books.
So who is Rosie M. Banks? Is she a real author? Well… yes and no.
Rosie M. Banks was originally a character created by P. G. Wodehouse. She’s a romantic novelist whose name first pops up in ’Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum’ and ‘No Wedding Bells for Bingo’. Bertie’s friend, Bingo Little, has fallen for a waitress named Mabel. Bingo knows his father won’t approve of the match since the woman in question is not of the same social standing as Bingo’s family. Jeeves advises Bingo to read Miss Banks’ novels to Bingo's father, claiming that her stories where “marriage with young persons of an inferior social status was held up as both feasible and admirable” will change the elder Mr. Little’s views. Unfortunately for Bingo it works too well. Bingo’s father marries a cook, making him unwilling to increase Bingo’s allowance - an increase Bingo needs in order to marry Mabel.
A few stories later Bingo meets another waitress and marries her. This second waitress turns out to be Rosie M. Banks working incognito to gather material for her latest book.
Bertie calls Rosie’s work, “the most pronounced and widely-read tripe on the market.” When Madeline Bassett gives him a complete synopsis of Mervyn Keene, Clubman in The Mating Season, Bertie says he’s left feeling, “a bit stunned. I had always known in a vague, general way that Mrs Bingo wrote the world’s worse tripe – Bingo generally changes the subject nervously if anyone mentions the little woman’s output – but I had never supposed her capable of bilge like this.”
Wodehouse liked to poke fun at other authors as well as various tropes in his work. It’s believed that the prolific romance novelists Ethel M. Dell and Ruby M. Ayres were the basis for Wodehouse’s Rosie M. Banks character.
In the 1960s a series of novels was published under the pseudonym - with Wodehouse’s permission - of Rosie M. Banks. One of those was Settlement Nurse below.
I have actually read Settlement Nurse and found it light, fluffy reading. Not bad, and nowhere near as soppy as the Rosie M. Banks of Wodehouse’s creation is meant to be.
