"Georgie held her hand a moment longer than was usual, and gave it a little extra pressure for the conveyance of sympathy. Lucia, to acknowledge that, pressed a little more, and Georgie tightened his grip again to show that he understood, until their respective fingernails grew white with the conveyance and reception of sympathy. It was rather agonizing, because a bit of skin on his little finger had got caught between two of the rings on his third finger, and he was glad when they quite understood each other."And that, in a nutshell, is the world of Lucia. Make Way For Lucia is the consolidation of all six of Benson’s books, approximately half of which are set in Riseholme (based on a town in Worcestershire), and half in Tilling (which is Rye). So it’s a monstrous thing once combined, and mine sits beside my bed like a Gideon bible.* I can pick it up any time, start reading anywhere, and know exactly where I am and usually what’s going to happen. Because I read it, and read it, and read it. I buy it whenever I see it in a used bookstore, and give it to someone. I have to be careful, because not everyone is going to run with it. Because ....There is nothing of import that ever goes on. There are no children. There are no poor, at least not that we see. No one has a job. No one is particularly nice, absolutely no one is selfless, and everyone is frantically curious about what everyone else is doing. They garden, they gossip, they have tableaux, they host themed dinner parties, and when they get bored, they bring in a swami or an opera singer to stay. They are not really supposed to be realistic portraits, though they’re not caricatures. It is one of the most delightful ways to pass the time you could dream up. It is everything, I think, to do with Benson’s homosexuality and his Englishness, and thus his scathing but generous wit, and his endlessly inventive ways to talk about the same thing and make it humorous all over again. I couldn’t imagine a straight man able (or willing) to write this book, nor even necessarily a woman, although there is that British Club of Splendid Women of a certain age that could likely pull it off. (Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym spring to mind.) The opening paragraph is quintessentially Benson, and I think it’s funny as stink. This is a desert island book, for sure and certain.*My copy is about a four pound trade paperback, and although I could replace it with a hardcover I found in a bookstore, I’m sentimentally attached to this copy. I loaned it to a friend once and she reached over to pick it up off the floor, and ripped the cover off like tearing the wing off a bird. She confessed it to me right away, but she had trouble doing so because she found it all so funny. She still finds it very funny and it’s been years. I still do not find it funny. The cover is back on with VERY YELLOW cello tape. Kathy, I’m talking to you. Still not funny.
E. F. Benson apparently had two obsessions: ghost stories, and high society, with an unrelenting hatred of social climbers. The distant rumbles of Bolshevism and the nearer-at-home threat of Black Shirts and incipient Nazis don't stir him to the heat of indignation that he reserves for middle class people pretending to a rank to which they are not entitled; a great many of his short stories are savage satires of bumptious mushrooms trying to shoulder their way into society, to the extent of certain plots being revisited repeatedly.His stories about the tempests in the teapots of Riseholme and Tilling are not silver fork novels. The denizens of these two towns all have cooks and maids, but the people are decidedly bourgeois, and get flustered in the presence of noble titles, whether the humans wearing the titles deserve it or not. There is nothing silver fork about the gleefully funny satire of Mrs. Poppit returning in triumph to Tilling with her Order of the British Empire, and her description of her triumphant visit to the king and queen.The Lucia and Mapp stories are twenties and thirties English comedy of manners, whereas his early novel about Dodo was very much in the silver fork tradition. In fact, in some ways I think Mapp and Lucia define twenties and thirties comedies of manners in a way that even Noel Coward didn't quite achieve, judging by the number of references I've picked up in collections of letters, memoirs, diaries, and the occasional obscure reference in a cozy mystery or other type of novel of the period.I end up taking these out and rereading them whenever, like now, I've got a cold and can't wrap my brain around anything else, but I've reread all my Austens and PG Wodehouse too recently.I also don't read them all the way through. For example, I usually skip over Lucia in London, which is an entire novel about Lucia playing the snob and being made fun of behind her back. I can only stand humiliation stories if I have no sympathy whatever with the victim, and I like silly Lucia, who does have a good heart in the clinch, too much to enjoy her being slow roasted by this smug collection of duchesses and countesses. And the ultimate chapter (view spoiler)[ which plot Benson reuses several times in his short stories, in which a homosexual society journalist is tricked into the bedroom of a social climber who is actually quite prudish (hide spoiler)]
Do You like book Make Way For Lucia (1988)?
I'm up to page 460 in this 900+ page tome of 6 books. And the pages are BIG, and the print is small. Bad publishing idea, but a great collection. You get a better insight into the malicious and petty, but entertaining habits of Mapp and Lucia as they compete to be the "queen" of their villages. What I love is that when they take it too far, they know that there's no game if you don't let your adversary salvage some dignity. What's hard for me to believe is that E.F. Benson was apparently such a serious person and that he could tell the story of such trivial issues in a warm and entertaining way. I look forward to my daily reading breaks with a big pillow balancing the book.
—Martha Bratton
I'm adding this book years after I read it, but certain cherished passages inevitably recur in my fading memory, especially as I'm now reading Saki and Sōseki's I Am A Cat.For years I sniffed at Benson's Lucia novels, somehow imagining that I was above them, that they were the sort of thing old queens who loved Ronald Firbank would read. Well, maybe they are – but I was wrong about myself. When I pick up this doorstop of a book, I can only echo the Foreword by Anne Parrish: "although my copies are warped from falling into brooks and baths, and their pages dotted with semi-transparencies from buttery crumbs that have fallen on them from tea-times, I cannot exhaust their freshness." In my case, the pages are wrinkled & stained from juicy burgers at Hot & Hunky, dabs of wasabi and vinaigrette from the salad bar at Harvest Market.Which is to say, these tales are addictive – and lucky is the soul who wanders into their quintessentially English pages, because she is in for hours and hours of pure malicious merriment. At 1119 pages, it wasn't long enough.
—Jim Coughenour
This series from the Mapp and Lucia books onwards was my big find of out-of-copyright (almost) ebooks. Social satire about shallow, petty-minded snobs in an English village. Some of the books have a slightly odd rambling structure, but the comic timing and phrasing is spot on. I suspect the satire is more biting than it appears reading it 80 years later in New Zealand, as my English grandmother was a bridge-playing, organ-playing personality in an English village and I don't quite dare suggest to my mother she might read the books; I think she'll just get cross!
—Anne
