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Queen Lucia & Miss Mapp: The Mapp & Lucia Novels (Mapp & Lucia Series)
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About Queen Lucia & Miss Mapp: The Mapp & Lucia Novels
Product Description E. F. Benson’s beloved Mapp and Lucia novels are sparkling, classic comedies of manners set against the petty snobberies and competitive maneuverings of English village society in the 1920s and 1930s. Benson’s series revolves around two unforgettable characters, both forceful and irrepressible women who dominate their respective villages in southern England and who will eventually end up hilariously at war with each other. Lucia is the more deadly of the two, with her pretentious tastes, treacherous charm, and lust for power. Miss Elizabeth Mapp, on the other hand, is younger and more forceful and able to terrify her opponents into submission. Benson introduces these splendid comic creations in the first two novels of the series, Queen Lucia (1920) and Miss Mapp (1922). Review “Benson’s Lucia novels . . . are camp, sly, poisonous, piquant, stinging, clever, and as delightful as a glass of sweet sherry taken on a sun-dappled lawn.” —The Telegraph (UK) “Entirely delightful. . . . Superbly ridiculous. . . . Benson constructs a comedy that is as exquisite, in its way, as anything in English humorous literature.” —Auberon Waugh, The New York Times “These magic books . . . are as fresh as paint. The characters are real and therefore timeless.” —Nancy Mitford, The Times (London) “Benson’s cult novels are wicked, funny masterpieces—and thoroughly addictive. . . . Lucia, Georgie and Mapp are three of the very greatest characters in English fiction, and with them you can never go wrong.” —Edward Gorey, Vogue About the Author E. F. BENSON was born in 1867 at Wellington College in Berkshire, England, where his father (who later became Archbishop of Canterbury) was the headmaster. Benson studied archaeology at Kings College, Cambridge and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, where he came to know Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. After visiting Henry James in the village of Rye, Benson eventually settled there until his death in 1940; Rye was the model for Tilling, the setting of his six popular Mapp and Lucia novels. Benson published more than one hundred books on various subjects, but remains best known for Mapp and Lucia. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Though the sun was hot on this July morning, Mrs. Lucas preferred to cover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on her own brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly that her husband had ordered to meet her. After those four hours in the train a short walk would be pleasant, but, though she veiled it from her conscious mind, another motive, subconsciously engineered, prompted her action. It would, of course, be universally known to all her friends in Riseholme that she was arriving today by the twelve twenty-six, and at that hour the village street would be sure to be full of them. They would see the fly with luggage draw up at the door of The Hurst, and nobody except her maid would get out. That would be an interesting thing for them: it would cause one of those little thrills of pleasant excitement and conjectural exercise which supplied Riseholme with its emotional daily bread. They would all wonder what had happened to her, whether she had been taken ill at the very last moment before leaving town, and with her well-known fortitude and consideration for the feelings of others, had sent her maid on to assure her husband that he need not be anxious. That would clearly be Mrs. Quantock’s suggestion, for Mrs. Quantock’s mind, devoted as it was now to the study of Christian Science, and the determination to deny the existence of pain, disease and death as regards herself, was always full of the gloomiest views as regards her friends, and on the slightest excuse, pictured that they, poor blind things, were suffering from false claims. Indeed, given that the fly had already arrived at The Hurst, and that its arrival had at this moment been seen by or reported to Daisy Qua
