[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by issybird

Something New, the American version, came first. Wodehouse was living in America and The Saturday Evening Post paid him $3,500 for it. It was published the following year in Britain as Something Fresh.

I finally understand the publication order: Something New (SEP) > Something New (US) > Something Fresh (UK). But the way these are referred to is confusing to me and I am very confused about what the original text is.

Here is the intro for Something Fresh from Wikipedia:

Something Fresh is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published as a book in the United States, by D. Appleton & Company on 3 September 1915, under the title Something New,[1] having previously appeared under that title as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post between 26 June and 14 August 1915. It was published in the United Kingdom by Methuen & Co. on 16 September 1915.[1]

Wikipedia goes on to talk about the differences in the books near the end (I skipped the plot parts since I am not done):

In Something New, Ashe Marson, Joan Valentine and George Emerson are Americans; Ashe (who comes from a town called "Hayling", near Boston, Massachusetts) and Joan (who was born in New York) are living in England, while George is a member of a New York law firm. Because of the change of nationality, there are numerous consequential changes in descriptive passages and, particularly, in the dialogue.

From the Wikipedia entry for Ashe Marson:

The hero of Something Fresh, Ashe Marson is a young man from the village of Much Middleford, Salop., ...

So, if Something New was first, does that mean Ashe is originally from the US? Or was the text published in The Saturday Evening Post/Something New an adaptation of Something Fresh that happened to get published first? From the intro they were all published very close to each other (the novels were less than 2 weeks apart and barely a month after The Saturday Evening Post's version concluded.)

Or, since some of these characters appear elsewhere (do Ashe and Joan?), were the nationalities changed back to the UK to help with continuity elsewhere? Although, given the close publication dates, I don't see how he could have known to make these changes for continuity's sake.