The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other.
(Chapter 4)
‘Any news?’ he asked.
(Riseholme’s catchphrase, Chapter 9)
Georgie explained the absence of his sisters and the advent of an atrocious dog.
‘He’s very fierce,’ he said, ‘but he likes jam.’
(Chapter 5)
When an irremediable annoyance has absolutely occurred, the only possible thing for a decent person to do is to take it as lightly as possible.
(Chapter 6)
‘Come into my house instantly, and we’ll drink vermouth. Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we’ll hope for the best.’
(High-spirited Olga, Chapter 11)
E.F. Benson
‘Queen Lucia’ is a 1920 comic novel written by Edward Frederick (E.F.) Benson. Born in 1867, Benson came from a very pukka family; when he was born, his father was headmaster of Wellington School (in Somerset) and went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a prolific writer of popular comic fiction, with a side line in ghost stories. His breakthrough novel was ‘Dodo’, back in 1893 when he was 26, a satire on the composer and militant suffragette, Ethel Smyth. But he is best remembered for the series of six Mapp and Lucia novels which began 27 years later.
Queen Lucia
‘Queen Lucia’ is the first of six novels in the popular Mapp and Lucia series depicting provincial, posh, snobbish ladies and their struggles for social dominance in their tiny village communities. It was Benson’s first popular hit since ‘Dodo’ a generation earlier and established a new subject and manner which he successfully mined for the rest of his career, in the six novels and two stories which make up the series.
The ‘queen’ in question is Emmeline Lucas, who thinks of herself as the social queen of the quaint Elizabethan village of Riseholme, a hotbed of pretentious would-be arts and culture enthusiasts. Symptomatic of her pretentious approach is the way she refers to herself, Emmeline Lucas, as Lucia and her husband Philip, a retired barrister, as Peppino.
Though Mrs Lucas’s parents had bestowed the name of Emmeline on her, it was not to be wondered at that she was always known among the more intimate of her subjects as Lucia, pronounced, of course, in the Italian mode – La Lucia, the wife of Lucas; and it was as ‘Lucia mia’ that her husband hailed her.
Lucia has a best friend, the foppish, forty-year old George ‘Georgie’ Pillson, her aide-de-camp, her ‘faithful lieutenant’ in the endless war for cultural supremacy of Riseholme:
Lucia put on the far-away look which she reserved for the masterpieces of music, and for Georgie’s hopeless devotion (p.265)
He dyes his hair, passes the time with embroidery or pastel drawing, and accompanies dear Lucia on her piano duets. While Lucia’s chief rival in these genteel conflicts is her ‘friend’, Daisy Quantock (husband, Robert), enthusiastic devotee of every passing fad.
Riseholme
This deliberately quaint little village has a high street, a duck pond, a pub – ‘that undoubtedly Elizabethan hostelry, the Ambermere Arms’ – and a village green where its inhabitants circulate every morning avid for gossip. When the story opens the undisputed monarch of this little domain is Lucia.
Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, and imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds.
Like everything else in the book, the self-obsession of Riseholme is extraordinarily exaggerated. Early on Lucia returns from a trip to London and when her husband asks about it, the resulting dialogue reveals that they really genuinely consider London a kind of hopeless backwater, compared to Riseholme, which is where true art and creativity and integrity flourish:
‘And how was London?’ he asked in the sort of tone in which he might have enquired after the health of a poor relation, who was not likely to recover. She smiled rather sadly.
‘Terrifically busy about nothing… I think this Riseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one for other places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life of its own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades. Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together, gabbles and gobbles…’
Later on, when the classical singer Olga Bracely announces that she is buying a cottage in the village with the declaration that it is a charming ‘backwater’, Georgie believes she can only say such a thing because she hasn’t yet realised that Riseholme is the centre of the universe.
True, she had said that she was coming here because it was so ideally lazy a backwater, but Georgie did not take that seriously. She would soon see what Riseholme was when its life poured down in spate, whirling her punt along with it. (p.127)
And that is exactly what she comes to believe by the end of the novel:
‘Oh, it’s all so delicious!’ she said. ‘I never knew before how terribly interesting little things were. It’s all wildly exciting, and there are fifty things going on just as exciting. Is it all of you who take such a tremendous interest in them that makes them so absorbing, or is it that they are absorbing in themselves, and ordinary dull people, not Riseholmites, don’t see how exciting they are? Tommy Luton’s measles: the Quantocks’ secret: Elizabeth’s lover! And to think that I believed I was coming to a backwater.’ (p.259)
Gossip
The inhabitants of Riseholme live for gossip, are gluttonous for news. Every morning they circulate on the village green, bumping into each other and fiercely competitive to possess and impart the latest gossip in what Benson jocosely calls the village ‘parliaments’.
The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other. They went about from shop to shop on household businesses, occasionally making purchases which they carried away with them in little paper parcels with convenient loops of string, but the real object of these excursions was to see what everybody else was doing, and learn what fresh interests had sprung up like mushrooms during the night. (p.58)
And he who corners a piece of gossip (as Georgie often does), seethes with self-congratulation and happiness, and a glorious sense of superiority, and spends ages deciding who to share it with to maximum effect.
Georgie felt very much like a dog with a bone in his mouth, who only wants to get away from all the other dogs and discuss it quietly. It is safe to say that never in twenty-four hours had so many exciting things happened to him. He had ordered a toupée, he had been looked on with favour by a Guru, all Riseholme knew that he had had quite a long conversation with Lady Ambermere and nobody in Riseholme, except himself, knew that Olga Bracely was going to spend two nights here.
Lucia
Mrs Emmeline Lucas refers to herself as Lucia. She is a fantastic epitome of 1920s intellectual snobbery for whom speaking Italian is the quintessence of civilisation. She is obsessed by Beethoven, the first movement of whose Moonlight sonata she practices over and over again.
Lucia’s husband made his pile as a barrister in London. He is now retired and writes prose poems, is the author of two slim volumes, ‘Flotsam’ and ‘Jetsam’, printed:
not of course in the hard business-like establishment of London, but at ‘Ye Sign of ye Daffodil’, on the village green, where type was set up by hand, and very little, but that of the best, was printed.
Lucia considers herself responsible for turning Riseholme from a labourers’ village into a palace of culture. Her tea parties, performances on the pianoforte, her dinners, her tableaux featuring classical characters, are all legendary in the village.
Lucia lives in three cottages which she and Philip bought, knocked together, festooned with period features, and named ‘the Hurst’. Behind it is the Shakespeare Garden where only flowers mentioned in Shakespeare plays are grown. All the bedrooms are named after Shakespearian characters of plays, Hamlet, Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream.
One of Lucia’s characteristics is her ‘silvery laugh’ with which, more often than not, she tries to laugh off yet another humiliation.
Queens, thrones and wars
The thing is that the metaphor of Lucia being queen of Riseholme is not a casual, peripheral joke. It is central to the book’s conception and the narrative abounds with metaphors of wars, campaigns, strategies, calls to arms and so on, from large events such as a garden party, right down to the individual cut and thrust of dialogue.
The competition for cultural supremacy is absolutely unremitting and colours all the thoughts of all the characters all the time. Eventually this comes to seem bizarre, almost surreal. Thus when the newcomer, Olga Bracely, threatens to become the new cultural supremo of the village, Lucia reacts:
Lucia had not determined on this declaration of war without anxious consideration. But it was quite obvious to her that the enemy was daily gaining strength, and therefore the sooner she came to open hostilities the better, for it was equally obvious to her mind that Olga was a pretender to the throne she had occupied for so long. It was time to mobilise, and she had first to state her views and her plan of campaign to the chief of her staff. (p.204)
You see how the entire thing is couched in military metaphors? They sprinkle the text:
Then with poor generalship, Lucia altered her tactics, and went up to the Village Green…
With the eye of the true general, he saw that he could most easily break the surrounding cordon by going off in the direction of Colonel Boucher…
By this time Georgie had got a tolerable inkling of the import of all this. It was not at present to be war; it was to be magnificent rivalry, a throwing down perhaps of a gauntlet, which none would venture to pick up. (p.165)
During dinner, according to Olga’s plan of campaign, the conversation was to be general, because she hated to have two conversations going on when only four people were present, since she found that she always wanted to join in the other one. (p.181)
Really it was rather magnificent, and it was war as well; of that there could not be the slightest doubt. (p.205)
The mock heroic
The entire thing is a peculiarly English, domestic example of the mock heroic. According to the Wikipedia article:
Mock-heroic or mock-epic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works by either putting a fool in the role of the hero or painting trivial subjects in heroic style.
That is exactly what happens here. Every new nugget of village gossip, every plan for a tea party or dinner, even down to individual conversational gambits, are all described as if they’re campaigns from the Napoleonic wars, major battles complete with battle plans, strategies and tactics. Here’s a little exchange which epitomises the mock heroic use of war metaphors:
Mrs Quantock, still impotently rebelling, resorted to the most dire weapon in her armoury, namely, sarcasm.
‘Perhaps, darling Lucia,’ she said, ‘it would be well to ask my Guru if he has anything to say to your settlings. England is a free country still, even if you happen to have come from India.’
Lucia had a deadlier weapon than sarcasm, which was the apparent unconsciousness of there having been any. For it is no use plunging a dagger into your enemy’s heart, if it produces no effect whatever on him. (p.73)
In a couple of places Benson breaks cover, as it were, and actually cites the classics almost in the manner of Homer et al:
Her passion, like Hyperion’s, had lifted her upon her feet, and she stood there defying the whole of the advanced class, short and stout and wholly ridiculous… (p.137)
Her whole scheme flashed completely upon her, even as Athene sprang full-grown from the brain of Zeus. (p.213)
He waited rather hopefully for their return, for Peppino, he felt sure, was bored with this Achilles-attitude of sitting sulking in the tent. (p.242)
Gay and camp
Benson was gay though, necessarily in the society of his time, concealed it. But as homosexual art and practice have been more openly celebrated over recent decades, critics have more openly discussed the camp aspect of the novels. Camp is, in a sense, a variety of mock heroic. Classic camp makes mountains out of molehills, wildly over-reacts to the trivial, simply adores those new shoes, ear-rings etc, just loves that haircut, simply worships the new Madonna look etc.
This gay aspect of the book is most obvious in the character of the self-involved Georgie, ostensibly devoted to Queen Lucia while all the time bitchily conspiring against her, fussing about his hair and toupee, worrying about his precious heirlooms. Critics have, predictably, seen Georgie as a humorous self-portrait.
Georgie (he was Georgie or Mr Georgie, never Pillson to the whole of Riseholme) was not an obtrusively masculine sort of person. Such masculinity as he was possessed of was boyish rather than adult, and the most important ingredients in his nature were feminine. He had, in common with the rest of Riseholme, strong artistic tastes, and in addition to playing the piano, made charming little water-colour sketches, many of which he framed at his own expense and gave to friends, with slightly sentimental titles, neatly printed in gilt letters on the mount. ‘Golden Autumn Woodland’, ‘Bleak December’, ‘Yellow Daffodils’, ‘Roses of Summer’ were perhaps his most notable series…
On a broader view, it’s possible to argue that the preening middle-aged ladies who dominate the narrative – Lucia, Daisy Quantock – are more gay men than straight women. This is the view of my wife who’s loved these novels since she was a student and impressed me by saying she’d never believed Benson’s older ladies were women at all; that they always seemed, to her, obviously gay stereotypes.
This is a subject I’m not expert enough to judge, but am just noting this view.
Plot synopsis
The narrative consists of a series of farcical episodes in which the Lucia’s extravagant artistic snobbery and battle for cultural control of the little village is repeatedly called into question, eclipsed, re-established and so on. These episodes are:
Mrs Quantock’s Guru
Mrs Quantock is a creature of fads. As the novel begins she is at the tail end of a fad for Christian Science. There is a great deal of secret comings and goings, investigated by nosy Georgie, before it is revealed that she has discovered a Guru, a Brahmin from Benares, who communes with spirit guides and practices meditation, stands on one leg in her garden, adopts complicated poses and positions (which he calls Yoga), teaches calming breathing and so on.
Mrs Q’s fussy faddishness is funny in itself, what turns it into Mapp and Lucia gold is the way that Lucia sets about annexing this new addition to Riseholme’s rich cultural life, persuading the Guru to come and stay with her, holding a lavish party to introduce him to the rest of the village, and setting up daily Yoga sessions for those interested in improving their spirituality.
The complexities of the discovery of the Guru, and his annexation by Lucia, are accompanied by a thousand and one little micro-aggressions between Lucia and Mrs Quantock who is, understandably, furious that her pet star has been hijacked.
Which makes it all the funnier when Georgie’s tomboy sisters, Ursula and Hermione, on a visit to Riseholme, recognise the high-souled spiritual adviser as none other than one of the cooks from the Calcutta Restaurant in Bedford Street, London, where the sisters often have lunch. He recognised them in the same moment they recognised him, and bolted indoors. The next morning he has disappeared and so have choice belongings from the homes of Lucia and Mrs Q. But again, rather than admit they have been duped, both ladies prefer to draw a veil of silence over the episode, not report the thefts to the police, and give out that the Guru had been called away on his endless spiritual odyssey.
Olga Bracely
In the same way, Benson creates a great deal of mystery and obfuscation about the next incident, which is the arrival of the noted soprano opera singer Olga Bracely in the village. At first she comes for a brief stay, but then confesses to Georgie that she has been thinking of buying a little bolthole miles from the hectic capital, before, amid various secretive hustling and bustling, she buys a cottage on the green and throws herself into village life.
This has all kinds of comic consequences. For a start Olga is bracingly candid as befits a girl who was born and raised, so she tells us, in an orphanage in Brixton (a mile or so from where I’m writing these words). It is a typical Mapp and Lucia joke that Olga tells the local lady of the manor and competitive snob, Lady Ambermere, that she belongs to the Surrey Bracelys seeing as ‘Brixton is on the Surrey side’ i.e. the south or Surrey side of the River Thames (p.101).
Both Lucia and Mrs Quantock valiantly compete for Olga’s affections and but she is stronger than either of them. Her arrival is like an earthquake in the small self-satisfied community or, as Benson puts it with characteristic hyperbole:
In the old days this could never have happened for everything devolved round one central body. Now with the appearance of this other great star, all the known laws of gravity and attraction were upset. (p.171)
Olga manages to make a fool of Lucia in particular on several memorable occasions.
The string quartet
On one occasion Olga invites a string quartet to play, and invites the villagers to her house to hear them. Lucia mistakenly thinks Olga has hired the quartet from the nearby town of Brinton, of which she has a very poor opinion. Therefore, when the performance has finished, she very loudly praises it but laments that it is not up to the standard of her favourite group, the Spanish Quartet – to which Olga artlessly replies that they are the Spanish quartet! (p.193) Everybody in the village overhears Lucia’s mortifying humiliation and Mrs Quantock emits a squeal of mirth. In Benson’s hilariously hyperbolical diction, this subversion of Lucia amounts to an almost Bolshevik revolution:
In that fell moment the Bolshevists laid bony fingers on the sceptre of her musical autocracy! (p.194)
The comedy then derives from Lucia’s desperate attempts to roll back from this humiliation.
Signor Cortese
Signor Cortese is an eminent Italian composer who has just completed a new opera, ‘Lucretia’, and writes to Olga, the noted opera singer, asking if he can come and visit her, play it for her and interest her in taking the part.
In her innocence Olga wonders who to invite for dinner with him and settles on Lucia and Peppino, because they refer to each other by Italian pet names and are always dropping Italian phrases into their conversation. They are a little intimidated by the invitation but spend some time brushing up their Dante in preparation.
But the dinner ends up being a howling humiliation because, upon being introduced, the composer lets fly a volley of Italian at Licia and Peppino, neither of whom have a clue what he’s saying. Cortese instantly realises this and courteously switches to his poor English, but the damage is done and Lucia’s reputation for Italian is destroyed in front of all the other guests in the most high profile way imaginable.
She knew that, as an Italian conversationalist, neither she nor Peppino had a rag of reputation left them. (p.197)
And the whole village will be informed and ridicule her:
The story would be all over Riseholme next day, and she felt sure that Mrs Weston, that excellent observer and superb reporter, had not failed to take it all in, and would not fail to do justice to it. Blow after blow had been rained upon her palace door, it was little wonder that the whole building was a-quiver. (p.198)
Princess Popoffski
The last major episode is the arrival in the village of a medium and clairvoyant, ‘Princess Popoffski’. She is another discovery of Mrs Quantock’s, who met her in a vegetarian restaurant in London. But this doesn’t stop her moving in and becoming a Riseholme sensation.
Spiritualism, and all things pertaining to it, swept over Riseholme like the amazing growth of some tropical forest, germinating and shooting out its surprising vegetation, and rearing into huge fantastic shapes. In the centre of this wonderful jungle was a temple, so to speak, and that temple was the house of Mrs Quantock…
This represents a setback to Lucia’s rule. She has been a lifelong sceptic and sniffs at mediums, séances and so on, but is badly left behind as the Princess becomes all the rage. Everyone else (Georgie, Olga, Lady Amblemere) attends the séances and feels the table knocking and witnesses ghostly ectoplasm materialising into the form of a character from ancient Egypt or ‘Amadeo’, who claims to be a Florentine and know Dante quite well.
Lucia is subject to a score of snubs and petty humiliations and micro-aggressions before the inevitable happens, and the Princess is revealed as a fraud. But not to everyone. Only to the Quantocks. When the princess goes back to London for a break, Daisy discovers she’s left behind a trunk which contains some of her props. Quite separately, Robert Quantock discovers an item in the newspaper describing the arrest of the Princess for fraud – he promptly buys up every newspaper in the Riseholme newsagents, especially Todd’s News which had a big feature on it, and burns them all.
The guilty husband and wife decide to hush the whole thing up. The other lead characters, particularly Georgie, suspect something is afoot, but can’t figure out what. Towards the end of the novel, Daisy and Robert discuss the case and consider inviting the convicted fraud Princess Popoffski back to Riseholme, treat her with all sincerity taking her at face value, purely to pull a tremendous confidence trick on the rest of the village! Consider it but then, reluctantly, decide to be safe rather than sorry…
Cast
- Mrs Emmeline Lucas aka Queen Lucia
- Philip ‘Peppino’ Lucas – husband, retired barrister, author of prose poems
- Georgie Pillson – Lucia’s best friend, ‘her gentleman-in-waiting when she was at home, and her watch-dog when she was not’ – plays with piano with Lucia and makes charming little water-colour sketches – ‘his mother had been a Bartlett and a second cousin of her deceased husband’:
- Dicky – George’s handsome young chauffeur
- Foljambe – his very pretty parlour-maid who valeted him
- Georgie’s two plain strapping sisters, Hermione and Ursula aka Hermy and Ursy – ‘they liked pigs and dogs and otter-hunting and mutton-chops’:
- Tipsipoozie, a lean Irish terrier
- Mr Holroyd – the barber who manages Georgie’s wig
- Mrs Daisy Quantock
- Robert Quantock – her husband
- Rush the grocer
- the Guru
- Lady Embermere – local gentry, widowed
- Miss Lyall – her companion – ‘This miserable spinster, of age so obvious as to be called not the least uncertain, was Lady Ambermere’s companion, and shared with her the glories of The Hall.. her head was inclined with a backward slope on her neck, and her mouth was invariably a little open shewing long front teeth, so that she looked rather like a roast hare sent up to table with its head on’
- Olga Bracely – the prima-donna
- Mr Shuttleworth – Olga’s accompanist and husband
- Colonel Jacob Boucher with his two snorting bull-dogs
- Atkinson, his man
- Mrs Jane Weston in her bath-chair
- pushed by her gardener boy, Henry Luton
- Elizabeth, her parlour maid
- Mrs Antrobus – with her ham-like face and her ear-trumpet
- the two Miss Antrobuses – Piggy and Goosie (p.113)
- Mr Rumbold – the vicar
Comic phrasing
For such a comic writer, Benson rarely comes up with comic one-liners or zingers. The humour derives almost entirely from the ludicrous attitudes of all the characters, which are treated with such deadpan seriousness, and the basic worldview of the novel, which is intrinsically comic. But there are exceptions:
Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the fumes of the wood-fire.
(Chapter 1)
The doorbell:
By the side of this fortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. When first Mrs Lucas had that installed, it was a bell-pull in the sense that an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and planted his feet firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung in the servants’ passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the white-wash from the ceiling fell down in flakes.
(Chapter 1)
‘Oh, I wonder if you can keep a secret?’
‘Yes,’ said Georgie. He probably had never kept one yet, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t begin now.
(Chapter 7)
Lucia’s garden-parties were scheduled from four to seven and half-an-hour before the earliest guest might be expected, she was casting an eagle eye over the preparations which today were on a very sumptuous scale. The bowls were laid out in the bowling alley, not because anybody in Hightums dresses was the least likely to risk the stooping down and the strong movements that the game entailed, but because bowls were Elizabethan.
(Chapter 7)
Chunky prose style
Over the past few weeks I’ve read a number of Agatha Christie novels and got used to her streamlined prose. Part of what makes Christie so readable was her development of a pared-back functional prose style.
Benson is the complete opposite. His prose is a hangover from the over-stuffed Victorian era, with long sentences packed with multiple clauses which create a very cluttered effect. At least one intention is that these elaborate periods to capture the complexity and subtlety of the rivalries and backstabbing which characterise the mental life of all Riseholme’s inhabitants.
There’s something comic about long sentences at the best of times, the piling up of details and clauses create a sense of cluttered absurdity.
Now the departing guests in their Hightums, lingering on the village green a little, and being rather sarcastic about the utter failure of Lucia’s party, could hardly help seeing Georgie and Olga emerge from his house and proceed swiftly in the direction of The Hurst, and Mrs Antrobus who retained marvellous eyesight as compensation for her defective hearing, saw them go in, and simultaneously thought that she had left her parasol at The Hurst.
A sentence like this also dramatises the way the whole of this little community focuses round the village green where everyone is spying on everyone else’s movements and continually deciphering and interpreting them, a hive of obsessive observation.
Stunt
The word ‘stunt’ crops up a lot in Christie (and F. Scott Fitzgerald) in the 1920s, to indicate a scam or schtick or technique or method. It was clearly a modish word and as such it crops up in Benson, too.
She had read the article in the encyclopaedia about Yoga right through again this morning, and had quite made up her mind, as indeed her proceedings had just shown, that Yoga was, to put it irreverently, to be her August stunt.
(Chapter 5)
Cat
I’ve got used, in the novels of Agatha Christie, to the use of the word ‘cat’ to denote a bitchy woman, and also the quality of bitchiness itself. Same here. Benson makes it the subject of a little joke passage. Lucia has made a comment to Olga about the forthcoming engagement of old Colonel Boucher and Mrs Weston, remembering how long ago she and Robert were engaged – which on the face of it sounds like sympathy but also subtly hints at how old the middle-aged couple are:
This might have been tact, or it might have been cat. That Peppino and she sympathised as they remembered their beautiful time was tact, that it was so long ago was cat. Altogether it might be described as a cat chewing tact. (p.196)
Summary
Very funny. Having skewered some of the popular fads of the day (Christian Science, Indian gurus, spiritualism) one wonders what was left for Benson to satirise in the sequels. Well, there’s only one way to find out…
Credit
‘Queen Lucia’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in July 1920. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.
Related links
Mapp and Lucia reviews
- Queen Lucia (1920)
- Miss Mapp (1922)
- Lucia in London (1927)
- The Male Impersonator (1929: short story)
- Mapp and Lucia (1931)
- Lucia’s Progress (1935)
- Trouble for Lucia (1939)
Books & Boots 