the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. Imagine then the interest that surrounded Miss Wintertowne! No young lady ever had such advantages before: for she died upon the Tuesday, was raised to life in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and was married upon the Thursday; which some people thought too much excitement for one week." As Michel Faber explains in his review for The Guardian, "here we have all the defining features of Clarke's style simultaneously: the archly Austenesque tone, the somewhat overdone quaintness ('upon the Tuesday'), the winningly matter-of-fact use of the supernatural, and drollness to spare." Gregory Maguire notes in The New York Times that Clarke even gently ridicules the genre of the novel itself: "[A gentleman] picks up a book and begins to read ... but he is not attending to what he reads and he has got to Page 22 before he discovers it is a novel – the sort of work which above all others he most despises – and he puts it down in disgust." Elsewhere, the narrator remarks, "Dear Emma does not waste her energies upon novels like other young women." The narrator's identity has been a topic of discussion, with Clarke declaring that said narrator is female and omniscient rather than a future scholar from within the real storyline as some had suggested. Clarke's style extends to the novel's 185 footnotes, which document a meticulous invented history of English magic. At times, the footnotes dominate entire pages of the novel. Michael Dirda, in his review for The Washington Post, describes these notes as "dazzling feats of imaginative scholarship", in which the anonymous narrator "provides elaborate mini-essays, relating anecdotes from the lives of semi-legendary magicians, describing strange books and their contents, speculating upon the early years and later fate of the Raven King". This extensive extra-textual apparatus is reminiscent of postmodernist works, such as David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997), particularly as Clarke's notes humorously refer to previous notes in the novel. Clarke did not expect her publisher to accept the footnotes. Feeley explains that Romantic poet John Keats's "vision of enchantment and devastation following upon any dealings with faeries" informs the novel, as the passing reference to the "cold hillside" makes clear. The magic in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been