E. F. 本森

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

Early 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 his wife born Mary Sidgwick ("Minnie").

E. F. Benson was the younger brother of Arthur Christopher Benson, who wrote the words to "Land of Hope and Glory", Robert Hugh Benson, author of several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson (Maggie), an author and amateur Egyptologist. Two other siblings died young. Benson's parents had six children and no grandchildren.

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. At Cambridge, he was a member of the Pitt Club, and later in life he became an honorary fellow of Magdalene College.

Works

Benson's first book was Sketches from Marlborough (1888), published while he was a student. 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 description of composer and militant suffragette Ethel Smyth, 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".

The Mapp and Lucia series, written relatively late in his career, consists of six novels and two short stories. The novels are: Queen Lucia, Miss Mapp, Lucia in London, 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.

Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories, which often were published in story magazines such as Pearson's Magazine or Hutchinson's Magazine, twenty of which were illustrated by Edmund Blampied. These "spook stories", as he called them, were 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.

Benson's story David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918) is a children's fantasy influenced by the work of Lewis Carroll. "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 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 titled Final Edition.

Links to Rye, East Sussex

The principal setting of four of the Mapp and Lucia books is a town named Tilling, which is recognizably based on Rye, East Sussex, where Benson lived from 1918 and served as mayor from 1934. 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 during the Second World War. 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. His dog, Taffy, is featured in the stained glass window. Taffy is buried in a corner of the garden at Lamb House.

Personal life

Benson was an intensely discreet homosexual. At Cambridge, he fell in love with several fellow students, including Vincent Yorke (father of the novelist Henry Green), about whom he confided to his diary, "I feel perfectly mad about him just now... Ah, if only he knew, and yet I think he does." In later life, Benson maintained friendships with a wide circle of homosexual men and shared a villa on the Italian island of Capri with John Ellingham Brooks; before the First World War, the island had been popular with wealthy homosexual men. It is unclear though if he engaged with homosexual contacts there, as he seems to have rejected casual contacts. He lived for some years with American artist George Wolfe Plank, who worked for Vogue magazine, at his home in Rye.

Homoeroticism and a general homosexual sensibility suffuse his literary works, such as David Blaize (1916), and his most popular works are famed for their wry and dry camp humour and social observations.

In London he lived at 395 Oxford Street, W1, now a 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 and Secret Lives occurs and where English Heritage placed a Blue Plaque in 1994.

Death

Benson died on 29 February 1940 of throat cancer at University College Hospital, London. He is buried in the cemetery at Rye, East Sussex.

Adaptations

"The Hearse Driver", segment directed by Basil Dearden in film Dead of Night (1945), based on short story "The Bus-Conductor"

"Mrs. Amworth", segment directed by Alvin Rakoff in film Three Dangerous Ladies (1977), based on short story "Mrs. Amworth"

Trouble for Lucia, a 12-part adaptation by Aubrey Woods of the first four novels, broadcast in February 1983 on BBC Radio 4