E. F. Benson was born in 1867, one of four surviving children of Edward White Benson, who rose through the ranks of the Anglican Church to become Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mary Sidgwick Benson, who was the daughter of another Anglican clergyman, and was said by Gladstone to be the cleverest woman in Europe. Brains and drive were not lacking in the family, to be sure. Both Benson's brothers were writers of note, and his sister was a promising Egyptologist in her youth although her work was cut short by ill health.

During a career that began with the publication of a school days memoir in 1888, he wrote more than eighty books and numerous short stories. Although the majority of his published work was fiction, he also produced monographs on Greek and Egyptian archaeology; two manuals for serious competitors in the rarefied world of English figure skating; vivid and well researched biographies of Alcibiades, Sir Francis Drake, Ferdinand Magellan, Charlotte Brontë, Edward VII and Queen Victoria; works of political analysis around the conflicts of World War I; and a group biography of Queen Victoria's daughters. The latter appeared in the same year as the biography of Victoria, a sort of companion volume that illustrated the far-reaching influence of England's longest reigning monarch.

The biography of the Queen is remarkably interesting in spite of the fact that, as a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury who knew the Queen socially, he was both privileged to see into the private side of the monarchy and constrained by the spoken and unspoken rules from divulging information that could be seen as too intimate or personal. He was too accomplished a writer for discretion to dull his work, however, and the picture he painted of her life is considerably more than a mere list of events with a few details stuck on like hotel labels on a trunk. Similarly, the biography of Charlotte Brontë is both evocative and psychologically acute, and those who have an interest in the writer behind Jane Eyre would be well rewarded by reading it.

The archaeological monographs were a result of digs he joined that were led by his sister, Margaret Benson, who excavated for three seasons at Karnak; they have not, so far as I know, been reprinted.

The books on figure skating were written after his competitive days had ended (he had been a national gold medallist), when he was judging other competitors on the rigors of the English style, which was based on precise compulsory figures and differentiated from the European (and American) style by its insistence on dignified restraint in both carriage and what might be called port de bras. The most recent quotation I had for a used copy of either of these was over £800; I believe it would be appropriate to call them rarities.

It was his fiction that really made his name, however. Beginning with Dodo, in 1893, and continuing right through his career, he wrote an average of two novels nearly every year. As is inevitable in the face of such profusion, not all his novels were great, or even good, but those that succeeded did so spectacularly. Dodo was successful both for its style and for the glimpse it gave of life behind the curtain of upper-class privilege. It also gave rise to a certain amount of talk behind the hand because its chief character was too identifiably modeled on Margot Tennant (later, Lady Oxford), who complained to a friend the portrait was so close that it included specific pieces of bric-à-brac in her drawing room. Succeeding works had lower sales numbers, and it wasn't until after the end of the Great War that he really found his voice.

During World War I, as he was too old to enlist and already suffering from crippling arthritis in both hips, Benson worked for the government in a shadowy combination of espionage and diplomacy, spending long periods in the Balkans and the Middle East. He never revealed details of his work, which he characterized only as involving "writing lots of letters".

Meanwhile, he was writing as a profession, working at his desk for four or five hours every day and turning out fiction in quantity. In 1920, when he published the first of his books centering on Emmeline Lucas, "Lucia" to her friends, he tapped the comic gold that was to bring him to widespread modern attention. Basing the central character on the well known writer of overwrought romance novels Marie Corelli (pen name of Mary Mackay) was a stroke of genius. Corelli's personality was an entirely artificial construct, comparable in these days to a Danielle Steel or a Barbara Cartland, and setting her on paper as an autocratic social striver turned a trifle into a classic.

The Lucia books, six complete novels and two short stories, have been dramatized for television and as spoken word recordings several times in the last thirty-five years and continue to delight lovers of social satire. Here he was drawing on people he knew in the rarefied society of his time, including a number of well connected gays and lesbians in the arts, but it's easy to enjoy the Lucia stories without knowing anything about the models for the characters. What distinguished the best of Benson's fiction was his clear-eyed comprehension of society's foibles and pitfalls and the generosity with which he portrayed his dramatis personae. His appreciation of his fellow man precluded cruelty in the way he depicted them on the page, and this is evident in the Lucia series. The one reference that always makes me crow with surprise and delight is his identification of Lucia's secretary as Mrs. Simpson in the penultimate book of the series, written in 1934 and published in 1935, during the agonizing build-up to Edward VIII's abdication.

Aside from the novels, he was a prolific writer of short stories, many of which were of the horror or ghost story genre. He had a deep interest in the unseen world all his life and was a longtime member of the Society for Psychical Research. Several of his ghost stories have been made into films, H. P. Lovecraft spoke of them with admiration, and a complete collection of them was published in 1992 under the editorial guidance of Richard Dalby.

Benson was uniquely situated as a writer. Growing up in the family of the Archbishop of Canterbury placed him at the center of British society. In terms of precedence, or social importance, the Archbishop outranks everyone in the room after the royal family. As a young man, Benson was on visiting terms at the highest levels, and he maintained his position throughout his life, receiving Queen Mary for tea in his home, playing golf with the Prince of Wales, staying with friends in the country who just happened to be dukes and earls.

He was also known to number some of the most influential GLBT creatives of his time as friends, including Dame Ethel Smyth, Radclyffe Hall, Romaine Brooks (and her husband, John, with whom Benson shared the lease of a vacation home on Capri), Noël Coward, et al.

Although he does not appear to have formed a romantic relationship during his lifetime, he did have extremely close friendships with a number of gay men, including John Brooks, and he was known to appreciate the company of the handsome and athletic. The entire Benson family showed a general wariness of physical contact and heterosexual involvement; none of Benson's siblings married; and, after she was widowed, his mother set up housekeeping with the daughter of an earlier Archbishop of Canterbury, Lucy Tait, who shared her bed as well as the expenses of the household. In the Lucia books years later, Benson named the highly eccentric artist Irene Coles's "strapping" maid-of-all-work Lucy, perhaps reflecting a certain dissatisfaction with his mother's arrangement that he shared with his siblings.

Benson lived in various places during his adult years. I noted above his summer share on Capri; at the period when he and John Brooks took holidays there, Capri was well known as a gathering place for well-off and creative gay men, much like Cherry Grove or the Russian River these days – among others, Somerset Maugham, Norman Douglas and, again, Noël Coward maintained homes there. He had three different London addresses, including 25 Brompton Square, a house in Kensington near the Victoria and Albert Museum that figured in the Lucia series and now has a British Heritage blue plaque; and lived from 1918 until 1939 in Lamb House, Rye, the model for 'Mallards' in the Lucia books, which had been occupied for many years by Henry James and was subsequently to be inhabited by Rumer Godden. During his time in Rye he was elected Mayor three years running.

Known for his close attention to financial detail and his informed play on the stock market, Benson died far from impoverished in early 1940 at the age of 72, having delivered the manuscript of his last book, an autobiography entitled Final Edition, just ten days earlier.

Since his death, two fan clubs have been established, The Friends of Tilling and the E. F. Benson Society, both headquartered in England and both accepting international membership. An illustrated biography, The Life of E. F. Benson, by Brian Masters, appeared in 1991 and may still be available from the Pimlico imprint of Random House; my copy is a well made paperback that has survived being loaned out several times and moving house several times without splitting or cracking.

In Commonwealth countries, Benson may not be the obscure writer he is in the United States. I would urge readers in the U.S. to find and read his work: the biographies are fascinating; the ghost stories are hair raising; and his social satire in Dodo and in the Lucia series in particular but also in a number of his other novels is delicious. If he is as underappreciated in the Commonwealth, I repeat my recommendation. The omnibus ghost story collection is still available, and a number of his other novels have been reprinted; recently, Nabu Public Domain Reprints began making facsimile editions of some of his work available as print-on-demand copies and although they are not inexpensive, the production quality is good; the Lucia books have been available continuously since first publication and can be had quite cheaply in paper.

I would ordinarily recommend ordering through The Book Depository or your local independent bookseller. Unfortunately, as of July 4 of this year, The Book Depository has been bought by Amazon.com. If, like me, you distrust or dislike Amazon, that leaves only your local independent bookseller, Powell's Books (www.powells.com) for both new and used titles or, for out-of-print books only, ABE Books (www.abebooks.com) as sources for Benson's work. It is worth the effort you may have to exert, for the sheer pleasure of his command of language and comic timing.

 

Wilde Oats is published three times a year, in April, August and December. Click here to be automatically informed of new issues when they are published.