E. F. Benson

E. F. Benson
Born Edward Frederic Benson
(1867-07-24)24 July 1867
Wellington College, Berkshire
Died 29 February 1940(1940-02-29) (aged 72)
University College Hospital, London
Occupation Writer
Nationality British
Notable works
Notable awards OBE
Spouse Bachelor
Relatives A. C. Benson, Edward Benson (bishop), Robert Hugh Benson

Edward Frederic "E. F." Benson (24 July 1867 – 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer.

Life

E. F. Benson was born at Wellington College in Berkshire, the fifth child of the headmaster, Edward White Benson (later Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, Bishop of Truro and Archbishop of Canterbury), and Mary Sidgwick Benson ("Minnie").

Benson was educated at Temple Grove School, then at Marlborough College, where he wrote some of his earliest works and upon which he based his novel David Blaize. He continued his education at King's College, Cambridge.[1] At Cambridge, he was a member of the Pitt Club,[2] and later in life he became an honorary fellow of Magdalene College.[1]

The Benson brothers, 1907.

E. F. Benson was the younger brother of Arthur Christopher Benson, who wrote the words to "Land of Hope and Glory", Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, author of several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson (Maggie), an amateur Egyptologist. Two other siblings died young. Benson's parents had six children and no grandchildren. E. F. Benson never married, and is speculated to have been homosexual.[3][4] Proponents of this theory point to what they consider the implicit (though admittedly critical) homoeroticism of his university works such as David Blaize (1916), his appreciation of the qualities of young men, as in "The Blotting Book" (1908), and his friendships with admitted homosexuals such as John Ellingham Brooks with whom he shared a villa in Capri.[5] (Prior to the First World War the island was extremely popular with well-to-do epicenes).

E. F. Benson was an excellent athlete, and represented England at figure skating. He was a precocious and prolific writer, publishing his first book while still a student. Nowadays he is principally known for his Mapp and Lucia series about Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp.

In London, Benson also lived at 395 Oxford Street, W1 (now the branch of Russell & Bromley just west of Bond Street Underground Station), 102 Oakley Street, SW3, and 25 Brompton Square, SW3, where much of the action of Lucia in London takes place and where English Heritage placed a Blue Plaque in 1994.

Benson died in 1940 of throat cancer at the University College Hospital, London. He is buried in the cemetery at Rye, East Sussex.

Works

Title page of Miss Mapp, 1922.

Benson's first book was Sketches from Marlborough. He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversial Dodo (1893), which was an instant success, and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama. He repeated the success of Dodo, which featured a scathing portrait of composer and militant suffragette Ethel Smyth (which she "gleefully acknowledged", according to actress Prunella Scales), with the same cast of characters a generation later: Dodo the Second (1914), "a unique chronicle of the pre-1914 Bright Young Things" and Dodo Wonders (1921), "a first-hand social history of the Great War in Mayfair and the Shires".[6] The Mapp and Lucia series, written relatively late in his career, consists of six novels and two short stories. The novels are: Queen Lucia, Lucia in London, Miss Mapp (including the short story "The Male Impersonator"), Mapp and Lucia, Lucia's Progress (published as The Worshipful Lucia in the United States) and Trouble for Lucia. The short stories are "The Male Impersonator" and "Desirable Residences". Both appear in anthologies of Benson's short stories, and the former is also often appended to the end of the novel Miss Mapp.

Lamb House, home of E. F. Benson and model for "Mallards" in the Lucia series.

The last three novels were serialized by London Weekend Television for the fledgling Channel 4 in 1985–6 under the series title Mapp and Lucia and starring Prunella Scales, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne; the first four have been adapted for BBC Radio 4 by both Aubrey Woods and (most recently) Ned Sherrin; the fifth, Lucia's Progress, was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2008 by John Peacock. During 2007, the television series was rerun on the British digital channel ITV3. A new 3-part adaptation written by Steve Pemberton was broadcast across three nights on BBC One; 29th, 30th, and 31 December 2014.[7]

Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric, oblique, and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories, which were often first published in story magazines such as Pearson's Magazine or Hutchinson's Magazine, 20 of which were illustrated by Edmund Blampied. These "spook stories", as they were also called, were then reprinted in collections by his principal publisher, Walter Hutchinson. His 1906 short story, "The Bus-Conductor", a fatal-crash premonition tale about a person haunted by a hearse driver, has been adapted several times, notably in 1944 (in the film Dead of Night and as an anecdote in Bennett Cerf's Ghost Stories anthology published the same year) and in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. The catchphrase from the story, "Room for one more", even spawned an urban legend,[8] and also appears in the 1986 Oingo Boingo song, "Dead Man's Party".

Benson's David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918) is a children's fantasy influenced by the work of Lewis Carroll.[9] "Mr Tilly's Seance" is a witty and amusing story about a man flattened by a traction-engine who finds himself dead and conscious on the 'other side'. Other notable stories are the eerie "The Room in the Tower" and "Pirates".

Benson is also known for a series of biographies/autobiographies and memoirs, including one of Charlotte Brontë. His last book, delivered to his publisher ten days before his death, was an autobiography entitled Final Edition.

H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of Benson's works in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature", most notably of his story "The Man Who Went Too Far".

Further "Mapp and Lucia" books have been written by Tom Holt, Guy Fraser-Sampson, and Ian Shepherd.

The principal setting of four of the Mapp and Lucia books is a town called Tilling, which is recognizably based on Rye, East Sussex, where Benson lived for many years and served as mayor from 1934 (he moved there in 1918). Benson's home, Lamb House, served as the model for Mallards, Mapp's—and ultimately Lucia's—home in some of the Tilling series. There really was a handsome "Garden Room" adjoining the street but it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War.citation needed Lamb House attracted writers: it was earlier the home of Henry James, and later of Rumer Godden.

He donated a Church window of the main parish church in Rye, St Mary's, in memory of his brother, as well as providing a gift of a viewing platform overlooking the Town Salts.[10]

Bibliography

Mapp and Lucia

Also known as the Make Way For Lucia series

Other novels

Short story collections

Non-Fiction

Autobiography

Selected articles

Plays

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Benson, Edward Frederic (BN887EF)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  2. ↑ Benson, Edward Frederic (1920). Our Family Affairs, 1867–1896. London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, Ltd. p. 231.
  3. ↑ Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Garry: Who's Who In Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II, Routledge p49
  4. ↑ Penguin Classics: Features
  5. ↑ Palmer, Geoffrey: E. F. Benson, As He Was, Lennard Pub, 1988
  6. ↑ Introduction by Prunella Scales to Dodo: An Omnibus. Introduction in 1986 edition from The Hogarth Press. Original publication of novels 1893, 1914, 1921.
  7. ↑ "New adaptation of E. F. Benson's 'Mapp and Lucia' on BBC1". 21 Dec 2014.
  8. ↑ "Snopes entry on the urban legend based on the Benson story". Snopes.com. Retrieved 2014-04-23.
  9. ↑ Morgan, Chris, "E. F. Benson" in, E. F. Bleiler, ed. Supernatural Fiction Writers. New York: Scribner's, 1985. pp.491–496. ISBN 0-684-17808-7
  10. ↑ http://www.tilling.org.uk/friendsoftilling/efbenson.html
  11. ↑ "Review: Account Rendered by E. F. Benson". The Athenæum (no. 4350): 273. 11 March 1911.

Further reading

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