Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson was first published in 1912. I love his Mapp and Lucia series and I think this one was a sort of dry run for those ones, he hadn’t quite honed his talent for replicating the atmosphere of a small town and it’s supposed foremost inhabitants. So it’s not as blatantly hilarious and sarcastic, but it’s still well worth reading.
The town is called Riseborough and it’s the sort of place where the retired and comfortably off men go to their club straight after breakfast, while their wives go to the shops do the shopping and hear any local gossip.
Mrs Ames is the queen bee, and her social gatherings lead the way for all the others, she likes to try different things and set new fashions. ” In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or to state the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad.” She’s over 55 and at least ten years older than her husband. Mrs Ames only makes social calls to Dr Evans and his family because Mrs Evans is a sort of cousin to the local aristocrat, who is also loosely related to Mrs Ames.
Mrs Evans is in her late 30s but looks ten years younger and has both Mr Ames and Henry the son hankering after her. Worse than that it looks like she intends to knock Mrs Ames off her social throne. But the older woman is more than a match for her young relative.
This was a good read, amusing and sometimes sad, a true reflection of the Edwardian lifestyle that E.F. Benson was witnessing at the time, in the town of Rye in Sussex where he lived for many years.
I checked my collection of Usenet ebook packs, downloaded many years ago. The only E.F. Benson book I found is “Michael”, which Wikipedia informs me is the title of the US edition of “Mike” (1916).
“Mrs Ames” and any other books I can find are going onto my TBR lists. Close friends (godparents to my daughter) retired to Hastings, and whenever we visited them, they’d take us on long drives to Rye and other lovely places. Wikipedia’s description of Benson as an ‘intensely discreet homosexual’ has also caught my interest. Such a vivid description: ‘intensely discreet’!
Janusz,
I don’t know about intensely discreet but I seem to remember that when I read a list of his guests at his Rye home, Lamb House, it was obvious which way his interests lay! He was the mayor of Rye for years though. We visited the town a few years ago and had hoped to go back this year, but the weather was so bad until now there seemed no point, maybe we will manage later in the year, but we have various other places to visit before that. You might also enjoy viewing the BBC Mapp and Lucia series with Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales, if you can see it somehow. There was a more recent one too. You might find my Rye posts interesting. https://piningforthewest.co.uk/?s=rye&submit=Search
Oh, how interesting! This really does sound like an early try at the Mapp and Lucia books!
kaggsysbookishramblings,
Definitely!