E.F. Benson’s celebrated Mapp and Lucia novels chronicle English provincial life of the 1920s and 1930s with a mercilessly comic, sometimes malicious eye. They focus on two formidable women who dominate the social circles in their respective towns. The stout and deceptively cheerful Miss Elizabeth Mapp is the doyenne of the town of Tilling (for which Rye was the model) She shops and snoops and prowls about her seaside parish preoccupied with the foulest schemes. Her smile is ‘frozen, so to speak, as by some sudden congealment on to her face, and when she was at her most waspish she was not afraid to smile as far back as her wisdom teeth.’

Miss Emmeline Lucas, otherwise known as Lucia, queen of Riseholme (a fictional village in the Cotswolds) has ‘indomitable vitality’. She is tyrannical and ambitiously snobbish, and suffers from delusions of grandeur. Her acolyte Georgie, an effete bachelor, describes her as

a hypocrite…a poseuse, a sham and a snob, but there was something about her that stirred you into violent though protesting activity, and though she might infuriate you, she prevented your being dull.

In the final three novels (there are six in all) the women are brought together in picturesque Tilling where, in order to establish who will reign as social queen supreme, a delicate but deadly battle involving ‘showy little dinners and odious flatteries’, begins. Miss Mapp has to desperately fight for her position as first social citizen of Rye and discovers to her horror, this alien from Riseholme is more than her match.

Fred, as E.F. Benson was known to his family and friends, made his cast of minor characters as ‘fussy, eager and preposterous’ as he found the real inhabitants of Rye to be. ‘Quaint’ Irene, the queer artist paints scandalous frescoes and thunders up and down the main street of Tilling on her motorbike; Major Benjy knocks back his whisky and revels in his tales of tiger hunting, and the Padre inexplicably affects a Scottish accent, even though he’s never been further north than Birmingham. They waver in their support of one or the other of the queen bees and dash about greeting each other with a ‘Quai-hai’, while imparting luscious secret information about each other. All the while the stunningly lovely Sussex town of Rye is omnipresent: a place of ‘enormous sunsets and rims of blue sea on the horizon’.

Rye lies two miles from the English Channel at the confluence of the three rivers of Tillingham, Rother and Brede. The labyrinth of cobbled medieval streets winds up an isolated sandstone rock, which is crowned by a fine old Norman church. The sagging roofs of red tile, and Georgian fronts conceal Jacobean and Tudor interiors and the streets offer views of the river Rother, Romney Marsh and the sea beyond.

Connection with Henry James

Fred lived in Rye for the last years of his life but it was a town that had been important to him from his early thirties when in 1900 he first began to visit Henry James. The great American writer was a friend of the Benson family, and at one point had fallen in lust with Fred’s elder brother Arthur. He lived in Lamb House (model for Mallards in the Mapp and Lucia books), an elegant red brick Georgian building with a generous acre of garden in the centre of town. In the memoir Final Edition (1940) written just before he died, Fred recalled how he had enjoyed the ’spell’ of Henry James’s ‘geniality and benevolence, of his absorbed interest in all the qualities, rich and poor, of humanity.’

There was a strict routine at Lamb House. Mornings were reserved for writing; after a ‘preoccupied breakfast’, James would disappear into a room in the garden, built at the time of George II, which had a bow-window looking straight down the cobbled West Street of the town. Waiting for him to emerge for lunch, Fred could hear James’s voice ‘booming’ and ‘pausing’, as he paced the book-lined room, dictating his novel to his typist who performed a ‘castanet accompaniment’ on her keys. James had already made elaborate notes on the story, and with those in hand, he would speak his pages.

To use his own metaphor his book when thus fully planned was like a portmanteau which he had packed with such economy of space that, when he closed it, he heard it “beautifully creaking” now he had only to open it and, in this dictation, take out and unfold its contents.

James would pause to find the perfect word or phrase, and Fred wrote that this habit of composition sounded like a ‘tapestry of speech being audibly designed and executed.’ One morning James emerged from his writing room an hour early and, ‘with splendid parentheses and side-lights’ told Fred the book (The Wings of a Dove) was finished.

Fred observed that Henry James was so steeped in creation and literature that it seemed to become part of his very being. When talking to friends, even the most trivial incident had to ‘be dipped in style, as in Tyrian dye: he put what he wanted to say in a chiselled casket of words.’ He recalled a day when they had paid a visit to a neighbour in Rye and James had wanted to tell them about a black dog that had appeared at the threshold of an open door. But he could not bring himself to say something as humdrum as ‘black dog’, so the description became: ‘And, from the dusky entry, there emerged something black, something canine.’

After his first visit, Fred would call on Henry James when ever he was nearby.

‘Rye has a spell, and I had come within circle of its enchantment, Lamb House and its walled garden, the cobbled streets with their Georgian houses, and, outside, the marsh, the gold, the empty sea-beaches beckoned, as by some secret gesture, with a promise of ideal content. But a young man of thirty, still very experimental in his tastes, and full of an energy for the due dispersion of which every day is too short, does not aim at content nor indeed desire it, and I did not contemplate living there.’

For the next twenty years in Fred’s mind, ‘Rye remained exceedingly distinct and delectable…like an image seen through a reversed telescope, but infinitely more remote.’

Dancing Elsewhere

Before he finally landed in Rye, Fred had other more important ‘dancing-places’. He owned a flat in London where at the turn of the century he was a famous writer and courted by a vast number of society friends. Later he was drawn to Capri. After the trial of Oscar Wilde (an acquaintance of Fred’s) many Englishmen were attracted by Capri’s reputation for sexual permissiveness, and for some years, Fred shared a villa on the island with John Ellingham Brooks, former lover of Somerset Maugham. Each winter he would spend a month in Switzerland skating (he had represented England and was a gold medallist). And there was also his mother’s home Tremans, buried deep in the Sussex countryside to which she retreated after the death of her husband.

Fred was witty and self-assured, an athletic, handsome man, with cornflower blue eyes. He was slightly aloof and in company could betray the arrogance for which some of the Benson family were known. Faith Compton Mackenzie, who knew him in Capri, said ‘there was always that faintly superior bearing which made one’s own little quips and aphorisms seem rather faded and old-fashioned. Hardly worth going on with.’ But this was a mask. Fred was an inherently kind, loyal and loving person and as his biographer Brian Masters points out, ‘it was as a son and as a friend that this very private man constructed his place in the world.’

Family Ties

Fred was born into a brilliant but emotionally broken Victorian family. He was the second youngest son of Edward White Benson, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mary (Minnie) Sidgwick, described by Gladstone as the ‘cleverest woman in Europe’. The Bensons and their five surviving children (Martin, the eldest died in his teens), knew absolutely everyone in English society in their day, from Queen Victoria, to Elgar, from the suffragette and composer Ethel Smyth to the Wordsworths.

At the time of Fred’s birth, Minnie was in the grip of a crisis. She recognised she had failed to develop any love for her god fearing husband, only a sense of duty, and had fallen madly in love with a woman. While Edward rose to prominence, Minnie’s passions blossomed, unabated. Everyone in the family appears to have known about her affairs and she even invited the occasional female lover to live with them. When the Archbishop died, her lover Lucy Tait, daughter of the previous Archbishop, moved into Minnie’s bed and became her life partner. In the Mapp and Lucia novels Fred created as an in-joke, a tall maid called Lucy who serves the lesbian painter, Quaint Irene.

All five of the Benson children were queer. The eldest Arthur (A.C.) was a Cambridge don, most famous for penning the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. He collected a succession of younger and beautiful men, including Dadie Rylands (friend to the Bloomsburies) and Percy Lubbock (who wrote the vindictive portrait of Edith Wharton after her death). Arthur left behind a voluminous diary (running over five million words) containing details described by Fred as ‘much more pungent than would be expected by all but the most intimate of his friends.’

Hugh, the youngest son, rebelled against his father and appalled the family by converting to Catholicism, becoming a fiery orator and a private chamberlain to Pope Pius X in Rome. He wrote some peculiar novels in a bid to further the Catholic faith and was involved in a scandal with the sinister fantasist Baron Corvo.

Fred was marked out by the others as a snob: frivolous and lightweight, ‘playing with his Earls and Countesses again’, as his mother quipped. He was just eleven years of age when he chose to stop signing his letters ‘Freddy’, adopting the more important ‘E.F. Benson’ with a flourish that took up much of the page. As an adult, his brothers looked on at Fred’s relentless socialising in London with an amazed horror. They deemed his books superficial and his athleticism meant nothing to them. Yet he was by far the kindest and most generous of them all.

The three sons were extraordinarily prolific writers and produced a large number of books between them. At one gathering they invented a parlour game requiring each of the three to impersonate the writing style of the other. After hearing their efforts Minnie roared with laughter and suggested they should continue to write each other’s books instead of their own: ‘You do them much better’, she said.

Mental Illness

A strong vein of melancholy and mental illness ran in the family. Fred’s younger sister Maggie, a brilliant academic, began in her twenties to experience spells of crippling depression similar to those suffered by their father, the Archbishop. It elicited in her what she described as ‘a thin, harsh, critical attitude.’ Concerned about her fragile state, Minnie and her lover Lucy moved with Maggie to the Sussex countryside, hoping the space and fresh air would help. But Maggie began to resent their intimacy, feeling that Lucy, by her constant presence, was coming between herself and her mother. Over time this conviction became stronger and she slipped from obsessive and disordered imaginings into psychosis. Fred observed the courage it took for her to fight this menace, the way she ‘clung to all the kindliness and normality of the world’, but illness had taken hold. Maggie came to visit Fred in London. He wrote that: ’The fear of what was approaching had deepened in her mind to a certainty,’ and she told him she wanted to see him first. Shortly after this visit she slipped into a homicidal mania and was admitted into a private asylum. She never fully recovered.

Fred was often one of Maggie’s only visitors and towards the end of her life, his wit and charm would revive her spirits and restored her humour. So it was that just before she died, she was able to have a meeting with her mother and Lucy free from acrimony or recriminations.

Brotherly Love

Shortly after Maggie’s admission, Arthur also began to suffer from fits of depression. He recognised Maggie’s preliminary symptoms and fear took root. He was to suffer two major breakdowns requiring hospitalisation. Throughout the years of his debilitating illness, it was Fred, more than his friends or any other member of his family, who went out of his way to help him, dropping what ever he was doing to come to his brother’s side, to chat, give solace, relieve his agitation or suicidal lethargy.

Arthur had always been resentful of Fred’s easy, early success as a writer, his obvious happiness and ‘breezy materialism’; the fondness for whisky and soda, servants, nice houses – those things that Fred himself described as supplying ‘the wadding of life’. There was Fred’s preference for repartee rather than serious discussion:

He delights in a kind of brisk and lively persiflage, which he really does very well, playing it like lawn-tennis with many dexterous strokes. Personally it bores me to extinction.

The world in which he lives’, Arthur continued, ‘peopled by dim aristocrats, is mysterious to me.’

Fred had argued that he preferred interesting to uninteresting people, and if those with brains possessed a title too, well they should not be dismissed out of hand. There was the Dowager Countess of Radnor for instance, whom Fred often visited at her home in Venice. Arthur had described her as ‘a nice old pussycat but very silly’, yet she was far from being empty headed. She was a musician who founded her own highly successful string orchestra for women. At her home in Venice she threw house parties that attracted the finest writers, musicians and politicians of the time. After her death, Fred wrote: ‘To be with her was to sit in the sun.’

Arthur’s barbs and his envy of his brother had bordered on malice but his attitude began to soften once he came to realise that his own happiness actually mattered to Fred. By the end of his first breakdown, Arthur was able to speak of ‘brotherly love’ for the first time, and wrote:

I sicken to think how lately I thought of him as a sort of easy-going mundane creature. Now I realise how far ahead of me he is in every respect – courage, will, effectiveness, kindness…I have sometimes thought Fred elementary and childish. Now I realise, in this dark hour, how infinitely stronger and better he is than I am.

Although he could be abrupt and easily bored during his visits to the family home at Tremans, which lacked the spark of society, Fred had a special affinity with his mother. Minnie was always ready to fall into fits of laughter at excessive solemnity, and shared with Fred an appreciation of the ludicrous in life. They stood as one against the illnesses that plagued the family. Minnie never gave up hope of her daughter Maggie’s recovery and after her loss (having suffered the earlier losses of her son Martin and eldest daughter Nellie), and when she was deeply worried about Arthur’s wellbeing she wrote to Fred:

You really are the perfectest darling in the whole wide world and have given me such LEG UP as cannot be described in ‘umin langwidge. O Fred, you really ARE. Fred, who has dug his Ma out of a  horrid pit and made her think she is the most gifted and delightful and refreshing person in the world.

Writing

Although he is best remembered for the Mapp and Lucia novels E.F. Benson was ‘uncontrollably prolific’. He dated most of his manuscripts from the first to the last page and they show that it would take him just three weeks on average to write a novel. By the time he finished one book, another was already in progress. He wrote 100 books, including novels, biographies (on Charlotte Bronte and Queen Victoria) volumes of short stories and tales of the supernatural.

Fred was just twenty-five when he wrote his first book. Inspired after seeing a production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, which was then the talk of London, he unearthed an old manuscript he had written during his university vacation, and reworked it. His heroine was a young, witty, unscrupulous woman from high society called Dodo. Dodo and her set were based on a privileged, posturing and clever group of friends known as ‘The Souls’. This group included two future Prime Ministers (Balfour and Asquith) and some of the most brilliant and socially accomplished women in England. They spoke a type of guileless prattle that Fred captured with aplomb.

Methuen accepted the manuscript for publication and Dodo (1893) became an instant bestseller and something of a sensation. There was a great deal of speculation about the identity of Dodo and before long many fans of the book had agreed that the heroine was based on Margot Tennant, the vivacious alpha female of ‘The Souls’, who had a habit of saying whatever was on her mind. Fred had met Margot the year before he wrote the book and was captivated by her theatricality and peculiar habit of speech. The book’s success took Fred by surprise and he was embarrassed that this not wholly flattering portrait – ‘a pretentious donkey with the heart and brains of a linnet’ – was now the talk of the town. Margot who married the British Prime Minister Lord Asquith, would be associated with the book for much of her life. Even the Prince of Wales addressed her as ‘Miss Dodo’ when asking her to dance at a ball, yet she was remarkably gracious about it.

Looking back in the last year of his life, Fred surmised that the early success of Dodo had been bad for him: ‘it made me think that all I had to do was to keep up my interest in life and dash off stories with ease and enjoyment.’ He was more than aware that he had often dissipated his talent. ‘My chief danger, the foe by the fireside, was the facility with which I could write readably: that was a handicap rather than an asset.’

Some of Fred’s biographies are solid and his atmospheric ghost stories were widely admired, even by the master of the supernatural M.R. James. But Fred’s novels about high society, were lightweight and routinely panned by the critics. He was not a passionate man, and his efforts to convey emotion were frequently clumsy: ‘I had often tried to conceal my own lack of emotion in situations that were intended to be moving, by daubing them over with sentimentality’, he confessed. But what he saw he could do well, a ‘chief faculty’ lay ‘in teasing the gilding off things which appear to be distinguished and are really common’. This faculty coalesced into a fine art with the Mapp and Lucia novels.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Mapp and Lucia, the writer Philip Hensher makes the point that E.F. Benson’s remarkable achievement was to have written a series of novels which contain monstrous characters with hardly a redeeming feature between them, involve them in tales of ruthless ambition, spite and revenge yet produce such a sunny, and cheerful ‘atmosphere of amusement’. Hensher suggests the series follows an English tradition of ‘narratives of humiliation, shame and cruelty as delightful and amusing entertainments’, a canon that includes The Pickwick Papers, Jeeves and Wooster, Vile Bodies and Love in a Cold Climate.

Return to Rye

When he was 49, Fred was offered the long-term lease of Lamb House, Henry James’s former home in Rye. His mother Minnie, and younger brother Hugh had recently died and Arthur was experiencing his second bout of severe depression and psychosis. Fred felt the house would be an ideal sanctuary for Arthur and invited him to stay. Making sure he was not left alone to brood, they shared meals and afternoon walks, and Arthur began to write again. Slowly he recovered and was able to return to Cambridge. But on his frequent visits to Lamb House, Arthur wrote his last books there.

Now, in middle age, taking charge of the house that no longer boomed with James’s voice, Fred grew familiar with the Arctic winds that blow up the east-end of the High street in winter, a sea-fog that creeps in from the coast, the melancholy honk of foghorns in the Channel and a garden that was  ‘bird-haunted’. Soon, ‘the town took on for me, not only in the drowsy passivity between sleeping and waking, a stable and solidified sense of home’, but also the sense that ‘I was not only in Rye, but of it. To be there made me content’.

Initially he discovered he was happy for days without speaking a word to anyone. A man who had always loved a party, he’d begun to feel increasingly at home in his own company:

I had ceased to be diverted by mere gregariousness. The elongated dinner-table no longer thrilled me because there were so many decorative people sitting around it… 

He enjoyed spells at an upright piano, figuring out how to play Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues by heart, and spent languorous afternoons watching birds in the marsh. Discovering a small square plot of unused ground at the west end of Lamb House, he set about making a secret garden, filling it with forget-me-nots, Darwin tulips, daffodils, narcissi, and anemones. He felt a ‘Lucretian glee’ at the warm, lamplit security of the house, in whose chimneys the chill, ferocious winds of winter made ‘a melodious riot’.

Idea for Mapp and Lucia

One day Fred received an invitation to tea from the vicar who was a former friend of his father’s, so he felt he felt unable to refuse. But the vicar’s wife did not turn up at the appointed hour and as local protocol dictated that tea could not be served until had she arrived, they admired her budgerigar and scratched around for conversation, until Fred left and had tea at home. The incident amused him, ‘somehow I felt it was Rye, the inner life of Rye.’ He began to think of a story set there, peopled with characters that pleased him, as he knew none of the locals himself.

As an outsider, he’d observed the women of Rye shopping in the High Street every morning, hauling their big market baskets around with them and talking animatedly with one another. He wrote to his friend George Plank:

Just now all the ladies of Rye are sitting in the streets painting the church, as there is a local picture-exhibition in a few weeks…the streets are full of these old tortoiseshell butterflies flapping about, rather the worse for wear, in the sunshine. their hats – I wish you could see their hats. I never saw such funny hats, with buckles and birds’ eggs and bandana handkerchiefs to decorate them.

An idea began to take shape:

I outlined an elderly atrocious spinster and established her in Lamb House. She should be the centre of social life, abhorred and dominant, and she should sit like a great spider behind the curtains in the garden-room, spying on her friends, and I knew that her name must be Elizabeth Mapp. Rye should furnish the topography, so that no one who knew Rye could not possibly be in doubt where the scene was laid, and I would call it Tilling because Rye has its river the Tillingham.

He added garden fetes, musical evenings and church circles to the mix and the power plays, dramas and gossip that fuel them. He adored mimicry and had developed a retentive memory for the nuances of pretentious behaviours.

Socially ambitious women had always fascinated Fred. In fact the outrageously pretentious Lucia, who he brought head to head with Elizabeth Mapp in Tilling was based on his friend, the best selling but atrocious novelist Marie Corelli. Like Lucia, Marie pretended to speak Italian while spouting only a few pointless sentences, and resorted to baby-talk to attract men or get her own way. Marie was so monstrously deluded that she moved to Stratford-on-Avon so she could live close to the other genius of English literature: William Shakespeare. There, the self appointed ‘social and intellectual queen’ imported a gondola complete with gondolier to glide her up the river Avon. Fred visited her home more than once, gleefully plundering her activities and absurdities for the character of Lucia. During one visit, Fred’s male companion fell ill, and Mrs Corelli had him lie on a sofa in the drawing room while she administered the warm brandy:

“Now ickle droppie more,” she coaxed him, “and then a snooze till dinner-time, and as bright as a button again…”

In a burst of creative energy Fred produced the very best of his work at Lamb House. He wrote the Mapp and Lucia series over the course of twenty years. The first: Queen Lucia (1920) and the third: Lucia in London (1927) were set in Lucia’s village of Riseholme (with Lucia’s detour to London to conquer the season). Miss Mapp (1922) was the second book, which sets the scene for the social life of Tilling (Rye). In the fourth: Mapp and Lucia (1931), the women are brought together in a stupendous collision, and Lucia’s Progress (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939) continue to follow their social battles in Tilling.

Queen Lucia was Fred’s biggest success since Dodo. For once critics and the public agreed.‘One of the best he has ever written’ wrote a critic. At last he had created characters that were unforgettable and true to themselves, where place, prose and narrative came together to produce the very best of British literary humour.

Sexuality

Although he cultivated a number of male friends who grew younger as he grew older, (including with Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’), Fred seemed curiously passionless. Steven Runciman, a friend who knew him well from the twenties until his death, observed that he had a ‘fastidious distaste for physical contact’ and a lack of emotional involvement with others.’

In his teens at boarding school Fred had enjoyed forming secret, furtive friendships with boys, slipping into a friend’s bed at night to whisper secrets perhaps, before creeping back to his bed before the morning bell. But he was shaken when two boys were paraded before the school and openly humiliated for an undisclosed crime and then expelled. Their mysterious misdemeanour led the boys’ imaginations to run riot. Fred later wrote that the silence surrounding boyhood sexuality was ‘libellous’ and ‘criminal’.

In Mapp and Lucia ‘that horrid thing which Freud calls sex’, to quote Lucia, is entirely absent. A number of Fred’s books rely on nostalgic reminiscences of the innocent yet rapturous relationships he had enjoyed with young men at Cambridge:

They had been together, of course, and none except a pair of boys under some bond of perfect comradeship could have come sauntering up, still together, in such intimate content. A boy and a girl couldn’t have done it, and a man and a woman even less; sex would have intruded with its disasters and consummations and intrigues.

Chaste love between boys could be celebrated but again and again in his books sexuality is paired with fear and repugnance. In response to Oscar Wilde’s public disgrace, Fred blamed his loss of control:

With the removal of discipline, the slime of intemperance and perverted passions gathered upon him again, till the wheels of his soul were choked with it.

Yet Fred was not without feeling over Wilde’s plight: ‘No decent man can feel anything but sheer pity and sympathy for one so gifted and so brittle and withal so loveable.’

Ending

In his later years Fred took to social and civic life in Rye with gusto, serving as a magistrate and then as Mayor for three years running.

To his surprise, he found the aging process reasonably pleasant and that as his energy waned, so too did his appetites, so that each cancelled the other out. He also had the pleasure of looking back on a life he had thoroughly enjoyed.

I recognized that these enjoyments had by some process of psychical digestion passed into my system and were part of me like my flesh and bones. They “worked within”: I could recall and relive them far more vividly than disagreeable experiences.

And more than any other of the many places he’d lived in: ‘Rye had so firmly pervaded me that I never even said to myself as I stepped out of the train, “Here we are at home again.”’

Music

Mozart – Vladimir Horowitz – Mozart Rondo ‘alla’ Turca Sonata K331 3rd mov

Lucia loves to spread her thin smatterings of learning and music far and wide. She is forever playing Mozart duets on the piano with Georgie, pieces she quietly rehearses when no one else is around, to give the illusion she is far more accomplished than she is:

‘Let us forget all about these piccoli disturbi, Georgie,’ she said, ‘and have some music to put us in tune with beauty again…Ickle bit of divine Mozartino?’…’Now let us breathe harmony and loveliness again. Uno, due…pom.’

Lucia and Georgie play the Rondo “alla Turca” in the latest BBC series.

Connection

Although they were successful in their day, the Mapp and Lucia novels quickly fell out of print and Fred seemed destined to become a cult writer. Then after the war interest in them was revived by a collection of bright young things (who were by this time no longer young): Nancy Mitford, W.H. Auden, Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. These  E.F. Benson fans placed an advertisement in the Times that read: ‘We will pay anything for Lucia books’.

Nancy Mitford had met Fred just before he died and they talked for hours about the exploits of Mapp and Lucia. In his last book he had made Lucia mayor of Tilling and he asked Nancy: ‘What must she do now?’ Alas he died before he could write another in the series.

Nancy wrote an introduction for the Mapp and Lucia Omnibus edition:

I must say I reopened these magic books after some thirty years with misgivings; I feared that they would have worn badly and seem dated. Not at all; they are as fresh as paint. The characters are real and therefore timeless…