Madeline Bassett

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Madeline Bassett (later Lady Sidcup for about four days), is a character in P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series of books. She is one of the young women to whom Bertie Wooster nearly finds himself engaged. She is fond of declaring that the stars are "God's daisy chain," or that a "wee star" is born each time a fairy sheds a tear. Wooster describes her (in Right Ho, Jeeves) in the following terms: "She was a pretty enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of breath-taker that takes the breath."

The daughter of Sir Watkyn Bassett of Totleigh Towers, Madeline is a friend of Bertie’s cousin Angela (the daughter of his Aunt Dahlia Travers). They meet on a trip to Cannes (in Right Ho, Jeeves) during which she believes that he is gazing at her with long, dumb, searching looks. What for Bertie is mere terrified longing for his warm safe apartment and the comforting presence of Jeeves and nice cocktail, Madeline mistakes for pining love; and when he pleads in the third person the cause of Gussie Fink-Nottle who adores Madeline from afar, Madeline of course mistakes his plea for a proposal from Bertie.

Bertie escapes this scrape only to re-encounter Madeline in The Code of the Woosters, The Mating Season, and Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. Madeline is subsequently engaged to Gussie Fink-Nottle, before he runs off with Emerald Stoker. In the ITV television series versions of the P.G. Wodehouse stories, Madline almost marries Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, but the attempted wedding is ruined by Tuppy Glossop's pipe clearing rust-bucket "Plumbo-Jumbo", in the series finale The Ties That Bind.

Madeline always thinks that Bertie comes to where she is to display his pining, everlasting adoration, when he's actually there for perfectly legitimate reasons having nothing to do with her. For instance, in Comrade Bingo, Aunt Dahlia tells him to come to Marsham Manor to rescue her magazine Milady's Boudoir from financial ruin by convincing Cornelia Fothergill to write a serial for it. Madeline happens to be there and she tells Bertie that he should not have come. Madeline, as usual, hasn't any idea that Aunt Dahlia is behind this and many other appearances from Bertie.

In the third and fourth seasons of the ITV series Jeeves & Wooster, 1992-1993, Madeline Bassett is played by Elizabeth Morton.