[1] Featuring the well-intentioned Bertie Wooster and his resourceful valet Jeeves, the novel takes place at Deverill Hall, where Esmond Haddock lives with his five overcritical aunts.
Gussie is upset because his fiancée Madeline Bassett was supposed to accompany him, but had to visit a friend, Hilda Gudgeon, instead.
To keep Madeline from learning about this, Jeeves suggests Bertie stay at Deverill Hall pretending to be Gussie.
Esmond hopes to win applause at the concert by singing a hunting song to impress Corky.
Jeeves, believing that applause at the concert would give Esmond the courage to defy his aunts and marry Corky, starts assembling a claque.
Following a plan from Jeeves, Catsmeat asks Corky to invite Aunt Agatha's young son Thomas to visit her; Thomas, a fan of Corky's, runs away from school to see her, and Aunt Agatha cancels her trip when she learns her son has disappeared.
Catsmeat tries to cheer up Queenie, the Hall's parlourmaid, who is distraught after ending her engagement to the local policeman Constable Dobbs, because he is an atheist.
Bertie intercepts the letter, despite briefly running into Madeline and Hilda, and returns to King's Deverill.
[3] He is alarmed to be: "trapped in a den of slavering aunts, lashing their tails and glaring at you out of their red eyes.
[5] Original word formations are created with familiar prefixes and suffixes; for example, to "de-dog the premises" (chapter 24) is a variation on the pattern of de-louse or de-bunk.
This occurs when Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is alluded to in chapter 8, when Bertie asks Jeeves why the judge let Gussie off with a fine: "Possibly the reflection that the quality of mercy is not strained, sir.
His worship would no doubt have taken into consideration the fact that it blesseth him that gives and him that takes and becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.
"[9]Like Bertie Wooster, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright is a member of the Drones Club, which Wodehouse uses as an "inexhaustible source of young masculine lead-characters".
[10] Bertie says of Catsmeat: "Today he is the fellow managers pick first when they have a Society comedy to present and want someone for "Freddie", the lighthearted friend of the hero, carrying the second love interest".
[11] The book's title comes from a statement made in the novel by Catsmeat that it is springtime, the mating season, "when, as you probably know, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove and a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love",[12] which is a reference to the poem "Locksley Hall" by Alfred Tennyson.
The book included several satirical jibes aimed at Milne, for instance after Bertie (pressured by Madeline Bassett) agrees to recite Christopher Robin poems at the village concert, he laments: "A fellow who comes on a platform and starts reciting about Christopher Robin going hoppity-hoppity-hop (or alternatively saying his prayers) does not do so from sheer wantonness but because he is a helpless victim of circumstances beyond his control.
[14] Generally, the role Wodehouse describes in the letter was performed by Gussie Fink-Nottle instead of Stilton in the final novel.
The first American edition of The Mating Season included ten illustrations by Hal McIntosh.
[16] The story was adapted into the Jeeves and Wooster episodes "Bertie Takes Gussie's Place At Deverill Hall" and "Sir Watkyn Bassett's Memoirs", which first aired on 19 and 26 April 1992.