E. F. Benson

Edward Frederic Benson was born on 24 July 1867 at Wellington College in Berkshire, where his father, Edward White Benson, was the first headmaster. His father later became Archbishop of Canterbury, and the six Benson children grew up in cathedral closes and Lambeth Palace. They were a remarkably literary family. His brother A. C. Benson wrote the words of “Land of Hope and Glory,” and his brother Robert Hugh Benson became a Catholic priest and wrote supernatural novels of his own. Fred went to Marlborough and King’s College, Cambridge, and then spent several years working in archaeology in Greece and Egypt.

His first novel, Dodo (1893), a society comedy, was a hit, and he wrote steadily for the next forty-seven years: close to a hundred books, including biographies, memoirs, sports books and a long run of novels. He is best remembered now for the Mapp and Lucia comedies, beginning with Queen Lucia in 1920, about the snobberies of two small-town social rivals. The fictional town of Tilling is based closely on Rye, in Sussex, where Benson lived at Lamb House, Henry James’s former home, from 1919 until his death. He took his small-town material seriously enough to serve as Mayor of Rye from 1934 to 1937. He died in London on 29 February 1940.

Running alongside the comedies were ghost stories, collected in The Room in the Tower (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928) and More Spook Stories (1934). Benson knew M. R. James at Cambridge, but his approach was blunter. Benson’s ghosts are often grotesquely physical: the crawling things in Caterpillars, the slug-like creature of Negotium Perambulans, the Alpine creature of The Horror-Horn. And his villains can be as cheerful as his heroines. The vampire in Mrs. Amworth is a jolly widow who plays piquet and gardens.

The seven Benson stories here are among the most purely entertaining on the site. The Bus-Conductor is a short premonition story, later adapted in the 1945 film Dead of Night. The Room in the Tower is the classic. The Man Who Went Too Far, a story about the god Pan, is the most ambitious.