year after next." Clarke and Greenland moved in together while she was writing the novel. Greenland did not read the novel until it was published. Around 2001, Clarke "had begun to despair", and started looking for someone to help her finish and sell the book. Giles Gordon became her agent and sold the unfinished manuscript to Bloomsbury in early 2003, after two publishers rejected it as unmarketable. Bloomsbury were so sure the novel would be a success that they offered Clarke a £1 million advance. They printed 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain, and Germany. Seventeen translations were begun before the first English publication was released. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was first published in the United States on 8 September 2004, in the United Kingdom on 30 September, and in other countries on 4 October. Style Clarke's style has frequently been described as a pastiche, particularly of nineteenth-century British writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and George Meredith. Specifically, the novel's minor characters, including sycophants, rakes, and the Duke of Wellington, evoke Dickens' caricatures. Laura Miller, in her review for Salon, suggests that the novel is "about a certain literary voice, the eminently civilized voice of early 19th-century social comedy", exemplified by the works of Austen. The novel uses obsolete spellings—chuse for choose and shewed for showed, for example—to convey this voice as well as the free indirect speech made famous by Austen. Clarke herself notes that Austen's influence is particularly strong in the "domestic scenes, set in living rooms and drawing rooms where people mostly chat about magic" where Dickens's is prominent "any time there's more action or description". While many reviewers compare Clarke's style to that of Austen, Gregory Feeley argues in his review for The Weekly Standard that "the points of resemblance are mostly superficial". He writes that "Austen gets down to business briskly, while Clarke engages in a curious narrative strategy of continual deferral and delay." For example, Clarke mentions Jonathan Strange on the first page of the novel, but only in a footnote. He reappears in other footnotes throughout the opening but does not appear as a character in the text proper until a quarter of the way through the novel. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke infuses her dry wit with prosaic quaintness. For example, the narrator notes: "It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than