Edward Frederic Benson
, 1867 - 1940
E.F. Benson (known as Fred to his friends) was born in 1867 to Edward and Minnie Benson. One of six children, Fred was a prolific author of many genres, including social comedies, memoirs, school stories, and ghost and supernatural stories. Fred’s family were incredibly important in the late Victorian period; his father, Edward White Benson, was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 until 1896, and his brothers, Arthur Christopher Benson and Robert Hugh Benson were also writers, with Arthur penning the lyrics for the Coronation Ode and “Land of Hope and Glory”, and Robert producing several religious works and being a Catholic convert, controversial for the son of the Archbishop of the Church of England. Their father suffered from “acute mental depression, which in early days had a blackness and fierceness of misery”, affecting the whole family, with Arthur and Maggie in particular suffering from severe depression throughout their lives (Arthur Benson, quoted in Goldhill 40–41). Fred’s two other siblings, Martin and Nellie, died young, and their loss was profoundly felt by the entire family, exacerbating their tendencies towards depression. Fred attended Marlborough public school in Wiltshire, where he had several romantic friendships with other boys. Today, the Benson family would be understood to comprise of queer people who didn’t conform to reproductive heteronormative standards of their day: after the death of her husband, Fred’s mother Minnie lived with her friend Lucy Tait in the same house as his sister Maggie and her female partner Nettie. Fred and his brothers also had relationships or attachments with other men. All members of the family have been called compulsive writers and all but Fred “inherited their father’s manic depression” (Carabine 8). Together they produced an usually large amount of writing (more than 200 books were published and thousands of pages of unpublished material). Further, both Fred and Arthur wrote multiple memoirs, painting a comprehensive picture of the family and their acquaintances. But each member of the family had psychological troubles, and as Goldhill comments:
“the self-distortion of depression and madness is a repeated, damaging vector in the rewriting of the family’s personal life. For the Benson family, there is a constant redrafting of the self, in conversation, in narrative, in writing – and in the eyes – the writing – of each other. This is a family that repeatedly and continually (re)wrote itself.” (Goldhill 8)
While at Cambridge University, Fred studied Classics (known then as “Greats”) and then went on to Greece in 1890–1891 to participate in archaeological excavations. During the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the surrounding years, Fred worked as a journalist for English language newspapers and travelled back to Greece many times throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s. His first novel, Dodo was published in 1893 to huge success, although there was some controversy surrounding the work, which angered his father’s “sense of seriousness” with Fred’s “flippant and disengaged” personality (Goldhill 6); the protagonist, Dodo, was deemed to be a roguish and “witty young woman in high society, beautiful, wilful, direct and utterly heartless” (Masters 99), and although the novel was a best seller with twelve editions in the first year of publication, Fred soon came under criticism for seemingly basing the main character on one Margot Tennant, daughter of a Glasgow industrialist family who was “vivacious, quirky, electric, with an embarrassing habit of saying whatever was in her mind” who Fred was “captivated” by (Masters 101–102). Although at the time of publication Dodo was very popular and “the talking-point of the moment”, Fred later wrote that the novel was “hideously crude [and] blatantly inefficient” (Masters 102; Benson, quoted in Masters 106). The influence of his interest in Classics and travels to Greece appear throughout his work, particularly in his novels set at school and comedies of manners, as well as his historical fiction, some of which was set in Greece during the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire and Turkish occupation. Fred’s written work spanned across decades and many genres, with his most popular today being his ghost stories and comedies of manners, particular the Mapp and Lucia series, which has been adapted into two television series (1985 for ITV and 2014 for the BBC).
Sources:
Carabine, Keith, “The Author’s Life” in E.F. Benson, The Complete Mapp & Lucia, Volume One, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2011, 7–10.
Goldhill, Simon, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Masters, Brian, The Life of E.F. Benson, London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.
Bio prepared by Keelia McKone, University of New England, kmckone@myune.edu.au
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