With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of
Kent at Canterbury. Lucia is one of the great comic characters in
English literature. Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and
snobbish, Queen Lucia, 'as by right divine' rules over the toy
kingdom of 'Riseholme' based on the Cotswold village of Broadway.
Her long-suffering husband Pepino is 'her prince-consort', the
outrageously camp Georgie is her 'gentleman-in-waiting', the
village green is her 'parliament', and her subjects, such as Daisy
Quantock, are hapless would-be 'Bolsheviks'. In Lucia in London,
the prudish, manically ambitious Lucia launches herself into the
louche world of London society. Her earnest determination to learn
all about 'modern movements' makes her the perfect comic vehicle
for Benson's free-wheeling satire of salon society, and of the
dominant fads and movements of the 1920s, including vegetarianism,
yoga, palmistry, Freudianism, seances, Post-Impressionist art and
Christian Science. Meanwhile in Tilling, clearly modelled on
Benson's home town of Rye, Miss Mapp consumed by 'chronic rage and
curiosity' sits at her window, armed with her light-opera glasses
keeping baleful watch on her neighbours. 'Anger and the gravest
suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil': and
Benson transmutes her boiling into a series of small humiliations
in his witty, malicious comedy. In his insightful Introduction
Keith Carabine shows that these books are excruciatingly funny
because Benson, like Jane Austen, invites the reader to view the
world through the self-deluded fabrications and day-dreams of Lucia
and the self-deluded chronic anger and jaundiced suspicions of
Elisabeth. Carabine also concentrates on the novels' disturbing,
bitchy, 'camp' humour whenever 'that horrid thing which Freud calls
sex' is raised.
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