You can think of The Mating Season as the finale of one of the greatest comedy trilogies of all time - it closely followed the wonderful Jeeves & Wooster novels The Code of the Woosters and Joy in the Morning, and the next time Jeeves appeared, it would be in the Wooster-less Ring for Jeeves.
It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.
I just did, for example: quad erat demonstrandum.
And I have to immediately apologize, because reading a good Bertie Wooster novel puts the old grey matter into Bertie Wooster mode, and I start faffing off in all directions for no good reason.
The Mating Season was the new novel about Jeeves and Wooster in 1949, fifth of what would eventually be twelve novels (plus a passel of short stories, with four major collections and a scattering of others in miscellaneous books). That puts it towards the end of prime-period Wodehouse: he started writing at the turn of the century, got good at humor within a decade and magnificent sometime in the '20s, had a great run in the '30s and '40s that slowed in the '50s, and finished up with somewhat shorter, less complex books before he died, knighted and in his mid-nineties, in 1975. There are roughly a hundred Wodehouse books, just counting titles he published in his lifetime; if you include repackagings and similar things, the total is even higher.
But this is one of the best ones, even with the caveat that all of the Jeeves stories are good - oh, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (the last novel finished by Wodehouse in his life, published in 1974) isn't where I'd recommend starting, but it's just fine about mid-way through. Mating Season, similarly, I'd put a few books in - it builds on the earlier novels, and works better if you know some of the characters already.
Wodehouse worked with a number of common situations and plot devices, something like a formal banquet at a big country-house, so that the broad outlines would be similar but the details and recomplications are specific to the particular book. So this one has Madeleine Basset in it - she's always one of my favorites; so soppy - but mostly at a distance, and only showing up for one major scene.
Someone has probably developed a schema for all of those Wodehouseian elements, but I haven't seen it. Mating Season is the one where Bertie Wooster, our narrator and hero, is visiting Deverill Hall pretending to be the noted orange-juice drinker and newt fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, who is also present, pretending to be him.
(The copy I read this time was missing roughly a signature - probably a binding error, since there's no gap in the pages - and it came right at the point where this switcheroo was explained. I vaguely remembered it from the last time I read Mating Season, and hummed over the rest.)
Along the way, there are four pairs of hearts who are sundered at least once during the narrative and need to be reunited, not least because one of them (the aforementioned soppy Miss Bassett) will attach herself to Bertie if he's not careful. And the reuniting, as always, falls to Bertie, with support from Jeeves.
Anyway, this is a Jeeves and Wooster novel: it's set mostly in a country house, there are impostors, and Bertie sums up the sundered and reunited hearts at the end to put a bow on up the proceedings. Jeeves is absent much of the time, meaning his counsel is not available at important moments and things can go wrong in amusing ways for a while. I still think Joy in the Morning is the absolute best Jeeves novel, but this one has a lot of great material - Wodehouse's writing is particularly amusing and sprightly here, with a lot of good lines in that goofy, slightly confused Bertie voice.
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