SOURCE: “First Love: Reading with P. G. Wodehouse,” in Profession, Vol. 94, 1994, pp. 21-5.

In the following essay, Lydon recalls her initial pleasure reading Wodehouse's Jeeves stories.

When my friend and colleague Elaine Marks invited me to write about a book, a text, a passage, or a line that, for whatever reasons, I had come to associate with what literature “is,” it seemed at first that I had been given the assignment of a lifetime. When it came to actually doing it, however, I found, to my surprise and dismay, that I was completely stumped.

No doubt what Roland Barthes tellingly calls the “aphasia native to humankind” (192; my trans.)—which is at its most acute, he notes, whenever we sit down to write—was largely to blame. But the specific cause of the impediment, I soon realized, was my assumption that the assignment required me to go back to...