Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short story writer, known professionally as E. F. Benson. Benson’s first book was Sketches from Marlborough (1888).
He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversial Dodo (1893), and he followed it with a variety of satire and romantic melodrama. The Mapp and Lucia series, written relatively late in his career, consists of six novels and three short stories.
The novels are: Queen Lucia (1920), Lucia in London (1927), Miss Mapp (1922) (including the short story The Male Impersonator), Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia’s Progress (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939). Benson was also known as a writer of ghost stories, which frequently appear in collections, and of a series of biographies/ autobiographies and memoirs, including one of Charlotte Brontë.
His last book, delivered to his publisher ten days before his death, was an autobiography entitled Final Edition (1940). His works also include: Crescent and Iron Cross (1918) and Michael (1916).
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