Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.
(Miss Mapp’s spiteful character, Chapter 1)

If there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness.
(Comic irony, Chapter 2)

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there.
(Chapter 2)

As far as she [Diva] was aware, passion, except in the sense of temper, did not exist in Tilling. Tilling was far too respectable.
(Chapter 6)

All semblance of manners was invariably thrown to the winds by the ladies of Tilling when once bridge began; primeval hatred took their place. The winners of any hand were exasperatingly condescending to the losers, and the losers correspondingly bitter and tremulous.
(Chapter 2)

Diva had ‘popped’ into the grocer’s. She always popped everywhere just now; she popped across to see a friend, and she popped home again; she popped into church on Sunday, and occasionally popped up to town, and Miss Mapp was beginning to feel that somebody ought to let her know, directly or by insinuation, that she popped too much.
(Chapter 2)

‘Our fair friends, you know, have a pretty sharp eye for each other’s little failings. They’ve no sooner finished one squabble than they begin another, the pert little fairies.’
(Major Flint on Tilling’s womenfolk)

There were smiles and smiles, respectful smiles, sympathetic smiles, envious and admiring smiles, but there were also smiles of hilarious and mocking incredulity. [Miss Mapp] concluded that she had to deal with the latter variety.
(Managing the malice behind social conventions, Chapter 7)

‘You wish to see me, Major Flint?’ she said, in such a voice as icebergs might be supposed to use when passing each other by night in the Arctic seas.
(Chapter 7)

When he first conceived of Miss Mapp, Benson was obviously following up the success of its predecessor comic novel, ‘Queen Lucia’. Only slowly did it dawn on him that these humorous books about monstrously snobbish women in English provincial towns offered a whole new subject. According to his biographer, Brian Masters, he realised that ‘his financial future might very well depend thenceforth upon his creation of monstrous women’ and that is indeed what happened, as he developed the Mapp and Lucia characters into a series which eventually consisted of six books and two short stories.

In the first novel, Emmeline Lucas aka Lucia lords it over the fictional village of Riseholme with its population of arty provincial ladies. Benson situated his new creation, Miss Elizabeth Mapp, in Tillingham, which is an only lightly fictionalised version of the twee tourist town of Rye, on the Kent coast.

Rye already had a reputation as being a bit of a writer’s resort, having played host to Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H.G. Wells among other luminaries. Obviously none of these appear in the book which is, instead, about the same kind of rivalrous, gossipy, bitchy women as ‘Queen Lucia’. With this difference: they’re poorer and nastier.

In the first couple of chapters Benson goes out of his way to describe how ‘straitened’ the circumstances of his little crew are. Lucia’s Risenholme set have dinner parties and evenings’ entertainments, they include an international opera singer and the local Lady of the manor. Elizabeth Mapp’s Tillingham circle is distinctly poorer and more constrained. Benson gives a detailed explanation why:

Dinner-parties entailed a higher scale of living; Miss Mapp, for one, had accurately counted the cost of having three hungry people to dinner, and found that one such dinner-party was not nearly compensated for, in the way of expense, by being invited to three subsequent dinner-parties by your guests. Voluptuous teas were the rule, after which you really wanted no more than little bits of things, a cup of soup, a slice of cold tart, or a dished-up piece of fish and some toasted cheese. Then, after the excitement of bridge (and bridge was very exciting in Tilling), a jig-saw puzzle or Patience cooled your brain and composed your nerves. In winter, however, with its scarcity of daylight, Tilling commonly gave evening bridge-parties, and asked the requisite number of friends to drop in after dinner, though everybody knew that everybody else had only partaken of bits of things. Probably the ruinous price of coal had something to do with these evening bridge-parties, for the fire that warmed your room when you were alone would warm all your guests as well, and then, when your hospitality was returned, you could let your sitting-room fire go out.

So their timid and limited social activities are in part determined by the price of coal. ‘Shabby genteel’ is, I think, the phrase. Google AI defines it as:

‘Shabby genteel’ describes a state of being where someone or something appears shabby or impoverished but still strives to maintain the appearance or manners of gentility.

Their limited circumstances explain why everyone in Miss Mapp’s little set cordially hates Mrs Poppit, who is richer than them, and does hold rather grand gatherings. She has a butler! And a car!! Everyone smiles and curtseys to her face but whispers all kinds of malicious gossip behind her back, because she doesn’t share what they consider their ‘good breeding and narrow incomes‘.

Although Isabel [Poppit] conformed to the manners of Tilling in doing household shopping every morning with her wicker basket, and buying damaged fruit for fool, and in dressing in the original home-made manner indicated by good breeding and narrow incomes, Miss Mapp was sadly afraid that these habits were not the outcome of chaste and instinctive simplicity, but of the ambition to be received by the old families of Tilling as one of them.

Accompanying the financial constraints is a similar restriction of horizons. Miss Mapp’s world is tiny, bounded by the view from her front room window from where she can keep an eye on people going to or from Tillingham church, on the front doors of the two retired military men, Major Flint and Captain Puffin, and see down the hill to the high street. She is a classic curtain twitcher, glued to her window and spying on everyone’s comings and goings.

There was little that concerned the social movements of Tilling that could not be proved, or at least reasonably conjectured, from Miss Mapp’s eyrie.

The microscopic parochialism of this tiny-minded community is very amusingly mocked by Benson:

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there. In particular, any manifestation of interest in kings or other distinguished people was held to be a very miserable failing.

This is what makes a person ‘Tillingite to the marrow’.

Direct link with Lucia

Incidentally, early on the narrative makes an explicit link between Miss Mapp’s Tilling and Lucia’s Riseholme:

She [Miss Mapp] had heard it last month when on a visit to a friend at that sweet and refined village called Riseholme. It was rather looked down on there, as not being sufficiently intellectual. But within a week of Miss Mapp’s return, Tilling rang with it, and she let it be understood that she was the original humourist…

The ‘it’ in question is a jokey way of saying goodbye Miss Mapp has introduced into Tilling, substituting not the French au revoir but a jokey expansion of it to au reservoir. All the characters jokily say ‘Au reservoir’ on ending their countless little encounters in the street or at bridge parties throughout the novel. Just this one fleeting reference is enough to confirm your sense that Miss Mapp’s Tilling set is a distinct notch down the social and cultural scale from Lucia’s Riseholm set.

Miss Mapp

She’s a nasty piece of work, this Miss Elizabeth Mapp, 40, single and spiteful.

The Major cast an apprehensive eye on Miss Mapp seated just opposite, whose acuteness of hearing was one of the terrors of Tilling…

She presents a beaming smile to the world and has a friendly word for everyone, but behind her mask she is endlessly hatching new ways to catch out and humiliate her ‘friends’, a mind devoted to ‘distilling all sorts of acidities’.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends, in spite, too, of her restless activities, Miss Mapp was not, as might have been expected, a lady of lean and emaciated appearance. She was tall and portly, with plump hands, a broad, benignant face and dimpled, well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping distance…

She is well known to all the shopkeepers of Tilling as a tight-pursed, cantankerous customer. She terrifies Major Flint:

‘A powerful woman she is, with a powerful tongue, and able to be powerful nasty…’ (p.197)

The comedy starts, as it were, with being amazed at just how much devious malice can fill the breast of one malevolent, hypocritical spinster woman. It is then elaborated as we (rather inevitably) see so many of her clever plans to humiliate her enemies blow up in her own face. In this, the basic structure of the comedy (malevolent schemer’s plans backfire) she is identical to Queen Lucia in the first book.

For example in Chapter 2 Miss Mapp devotes an inordinate amount of mental energy to calculating how to ruin the bridge evening being held by Mrs Poppit, only herself to be worsted. When she cheats at bridge she is discovered and criticised. And so on. The biter bit.

Miss Mapp’s enemies

Difficult to know who she hates more. Is it Mrs Poppit or Miss Coles or Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow?

Mrs Poppit

Posh Mrs Poppit has a butler – the amusingly lugubrious Boon – an offensively grand car – which she offensively refers to as ‘the Royce’. She and her daughter go to Switzerland every winter and Scotland every summer. In other words, compared to everyone else, they’re loaded!

Towering over everything in triggering the malicious envy of the genteel set is that, horrible to say, she has recently been awarded an MBE! Member of the Order of the British Empire! Tillingham is outraged because all she did to earn this ridiculous honour was put ‘the Royce’ and its chauffeur at the disposal of Tillingham hospital during the war, she herself didn’t lift a finger. Miss Mapp and her set quietly seethe with resentment at the way their war work – the work of the Tilling Working Club, which had knitted its fingers to the bone and made enough seven-tailed bandages to reach to the moon – received precisely no recognition! Unfair world! After one particularly mortifying humiliation, Miss Mapp feels:

If she had had a naval fifteen-inch gun handy, and had known how to fire it, she would, with a sense of duty accomplished, have discharged it point-blank at the Order of the Member of the British Empire, and at anybody else who might be within range…

Miss Irene Coles

As far as I can tell, Irene Coles is a portrait of a cigarette-smoking, masculine kind of lesbian. In Miss Mapp’s outraged view she is:

The Disgrace of Tilling and her sex, the suffragette, post-impressionist artist (who painted from the nude, both male and female), the socialist and the Germanophile, Miss Coles.

Miss Mapp has tried her utmost ‘to poison the collective mind of Tilling against this Creature’ but ‘the bitterest part of it all was that if Miss Coles was amused at anybody, and she undoubtedly was, she was amused at Miss Mapp’.

Miss Mapp keeps trying to humiliate and genteelly mock Miss Coles and yet, somehow, the chunky mannish woman artist, dressed like a jockey and puffing on a gasper, always laughs her off. Time and again, Miss Mapp is left seething with toxic rage.

Part of it is that she’s scared of her. Miss Coles is clever:

Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as ‘quaint Irene,’ but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.

Mock heroic

Reprisals, bitterness, scheming, malice – it makes it sound like international diplomacy during a crisis this is Benson’s trick, the series’ USP: to invest the minutiae of small town life, and its myriad petty rivalries and jealousies, with astonishing complexity, scheming and strategy. It is a version of the mock heroic, applying the highest, most serious style and tone and intellectual rigour, to the most ludicrously trivial incidents.

Thus the war of the two dresses (which I explain below) is said to involve ‘treachery and low cunning’, ‘fiendish revenge’, ‘malice and envy’ such as never known in all human history, as well as ‘the joy of battle’ and the sweetness of revenge (Chapter 4) – and all the other silly incidents and little bickerings are raised to the level of, and given the detailed analysis worthy of, full-blown military campaigns, very amusingly and hyperbolically.

Whatever attack she made on this mystery, the garrison failed to march out and surrender but kept their flag flying, and her conjectures were woefully blasted by the forces of the most elementary reasons. (p.136)

To one of Miss Mapp’s experience, the first step of her new and delightful strategic campaign was obvious, and she spent hardly any time at all in the window of her garden-room after breakfast next morning, but set out with her shopping-basket at an unusually early hour.

And, as in Queen Lucia, Benson even throws in a few mock heroic similes to amuse his literate readers, signalled by the poetic inversion at the end of the sentence:

Even as Athene sprang full grown and panoplied from the brain of Zeus, so from Diva’s brain there sprang her plan complete.

Cast

• Miss Elizabeth Mapp – spies on all Tilling’s comings and goings with ‘her light aluminium opera-glasses’ – ‘old Mappy’ to Flint and Puffin (p.107)
  • Withers, her parlourmaid
• Major Benjamin Flint – ‘was the more attractive to the feminine sense; for years Miss Mapp had tried to cajole him into marrying her, and had not nearly finished yet’ – when she feels soppy, Miss Mapp secretly calls him ‘Major Benjy’
  • Mrs Dominic – his maid
• Captain Puffin – ‘He was lame and short and meagre, with strings of peaceful beads and Papuan aprons in his hall instead of wild tiger-skins, and had a jerky, inattentive manner and a high-pitched voice. Yet to Miss Mapp’s mind there was something behind his unimpressiveness that had a mysterious quality’ – irritating falsetto laugh, limp
  • housemaid
  • Mrs Gashly – his cook
• Mrs Godiva Plaistow aka ‘Diva’ – carrying her wicker basket, ‘a short, stout, breathless body’, peculiar way of walking as if she has wheels instead of legs – endless rivalrous scheming against Miss Mapp – stuffs her face with chocolates at every opportunity (p.141) – bitter enemy in ‘the dress war’ – speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lucky birds,’ she said. ‘No teeth. Beaks’ – guaranteed to cause an argument at every bridge session
  • Janet – her parlourmaid
• Mrs Susan Poppit – amazingly awarded an MBE, solely for lending her motor car to the local hospital – a social climber – has a butler, car and posh holidays – keeps a notebook of malapropisms and spoonerisms
• Isabel Poppit – her adoring daughter
  • Boon, her butler
• Miss Irene Coles – ‘Irene lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, Lucy, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards’ – presumably a lesbian (?)
• Mr Kenneth Bartlett – the vicar, good at cards – ‘Mr Bartlett was humorously archaic in speech. He interlarded archaisms with Highland expressions, and his face was knobby, like a chest of drawers’
• Mrs Evie Bartlett – his wife, aka ‘wee wifey’, mousey, emits high-pitched squeaks and squeals
• Mr Algernon Wyse – generally seen as posh, spends long summers with his sister, the Contessa di Faraglione, at Capri – declines most invitations, but invites everyone to his weekly Thursday luncheons
  • Figgis – his valet
• Amelia, the Contessa di Faraglione, when she arrives, fearlessly outspoken and flirtatious
• Mr Dabnet – keeper of the Tilling toy shop
• Mr Wootten – the coal merchant
• Mr Twemlow – the grocer
• Mr Hopkins – the fishmonger, who models for Irene Coles in the nude
• Miss Greele – dressmaker
• Mrs Brace – the doctor’s wife

Major incidents

The failed attempt to sabotage Mrs Poppit’s bridge

Mrs Poppit only casually invites Miss Mapp to a bridge afternoon, which Miss Mapp takes as an insult and triggers feverish calculations of how to screw up the occasion. During the course of the morning she casually introduces the topic with all the usual suspects in order to figure out precisely how many people have been invited. Eight is the ideal number, creating two tables of four. Miss Mapp decides she will ‘squeeze’ her visit in in such a way as to create too many guests and thus embarrass her hostess.

In the event, all these calculations are futile because she makes up the eighth guest with no confusion and so the party proceeds smoothly – exactly what she was hoping to prevent.

The abortive visit of the Prince of Wales

Because of her recent visit to Buckingham Palace to receive her MBE, Mrs Poppit lets slip her knowledge that the Prince of Wales will be passing through the town on Saturday, on his way to Ardingly Park. This is because Tilling is the nearest railway station for Ardingly.

Now the thing about all genteel Tillingites is they have this cult that absolutely nothing which happens outside Tilling, or anyone who comes from outside Tilling, is of the slightest interest. Except that, of course, a visit from royalty triggers their grossest snobberies.

So the comedy of this passage derives from the way all the seven or eight characters we’ve come to know all pretend to each other to not be giving the Prince’s fleeting visit the slightest thought, while secretly, of course, they are all buying the train timetable, getting our their best suits and frocks, even buying little Union Jack flags, and all plan to accidentally just ‘happen’ to be in the little square in front of the railway station.

Miss Mapp is among the most outstandingly hypocritical of the bunch, in conversations continually claiming to have forgotten all about it while, as the time of the most likely train approaches, she mounts to the roof window of her house and uses binoculars to identify that towards 4.15 (time of a train arrival) lots of others are assembling in the square. So she rushes downstairs, checks herself in the mirror and bustles along to the square. She arrives just as a swish car is pulling away and, deciding to show the hoi polloi what a proper curtsey looks like, stoops so low that she in fact loses her balance and clumsily sits down in the road just as the car sweeps by. Just in time to hear laughter coming from the people inside who saw her squat so clumsily into the street.

The others come up and crowingly tell her that wasn’t the Prince of Wales at all; he arrived on the one o’clock train so they all missed him, and has been happily playing golf all afternoon. Humiliation.

And there’s a comic coda. The next day is Sunday and the genteel set hope the prince might attend their church but he doesn’t show. The Major and the Captain go off to play golf and, given news of the Prince’s golf the day before, they are surprised to find every hole and bunker unusually populated with Tillingites, clearly hoping to catch a glimpse of Royalty, although all telling each other and themselves that they don’t care in the slightest. Miss Mapp is among them.

But the joke is that on the day that most of Tilling went out to the golf course to see the Prince, the Prince decided to go sightseeing in Tilling. When Miss Mapp returns exhausted from a day traipsing round the golf course, her servant tells her the Prince, had spent five minutes outside Miss Mapp’s very own garden room, and had even sat on the steps and smoked a cigarette. On her steps! Outside her house! She missed him. Again!

The humiliating battle of the decorated dresses

Miss Mapp discovers that Diva has taken down her shabby old chintz curtains and is carefully cutting out the roses from their pattern, with the aim of sewing the roses onto her blouse to jazz it up.

She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses.

Miss Mapp is inspired by this discovery, not just to adapt it herself but – characteristically – to get one over on Diva and humiliate her, by doing the same kind of thing first! So she goes home, rummages around, finds a worn chintz cover that had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room and is covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out). She sets her maid, Withers, to cut out the poppy patterns and sew them onto one of her plain dresses, in a race to beat Diva.

By working her maid hard she has her poppy-strewn dress ready by the next day and goes swanking around Tilling, making sure to call into every shop (sometimes several times), swan up and down the high street, pop her head into all her friends’ front doors and generally demonstrate how fantastically original and creative she has been in creating such a wonderfully decorative dress!

This, when she sees it, of course, drives Diva wild with rage and mortification… until she has a brainwave, a drastic plan to get her own back. She will give the beautiful rose-decorated jacket she and her maid, Janet, are just getting to the end of creating to her maid. Janet is bowled over with gratitude. She doesn’t quite realise Diva has made this magnanimous gift solely to humiliate Miss Mapp.

Her plan works. When everyone sees Janet wearing the rose-studded dress they instantly associate it with the servant class and at a stroke Miss Mapp’s coup is turned into a public humiliation. Triumph for Diva!

Miss Mapp’s hoarding revealed

There are rumours of an impending coal strike. Since everyone’s homes and cookers are heated by coal this represents a real threat. The government gives out that nobody should hoard either coal or food. Miss Mapp genteelly warns Diva that there is a law against it and she might be prosecuted. But observing Miss M visiting the grocer every day, instead of every couple of days like normal folk, Diva starts to suspect that it’s old Mappy who’s hoarding.

She confirms the coal hoarding by cross-questioning the coal merchant, Mr Wootten. Then she racks her brains – she and Mapp are shown on pretty much every page, racking their brains and engaging in intense cerebration to puzzle out the secrets of each others’ behaviour, just as Miss Mapp devotes hours to speculating on what the Major and the Captain really get up to – to think where in Miss Mapp’s small house she could be hoarding food.

She has a brainwave when she realises that the big bookcase, against which the bridge table is usually pressed on tea dates, is fake – it’s just a facade of book covers with no depth. Next time she’s invited for bridge at Miss Mapp’s, Diva arrives early and while the maid is calling Miss M, she hurries to the bookcase in question, pushes the bridge table away, feels up and down it and locates the secret catch. Undoing it she confirms her suspicions for the whole facade of spines of books begins to open revealing a concealed larder.

Unfortunately, as she opens it a fraction she hears something fall off a shelf within and this means she can’t quite push it to enough to redo the catch. She hears Miss Mapp coming and squeezes it as shut as possible and wedges the bridge table back up against it, scooting away as Miss Mapp enters the room.

So far, so full of secrets and lies and hypocrisies and cunning plans for revenge and exposure and humiliation i.e. standard Tilling behaviour. What happens next turns comedy into farce. For before the bridge commences, Miss Mapp treats her guests to tea and chocolate cake and shows Mrs Poppit, whose first visit it is, round her house. Mrs Poppit closely inspects the fittings of the garden room and, when she comes to the bookshelf, innocently points out to her daughter that she thinks it looks fake and gives it a little tug and…

The fake frontage swings open and Miss Mapp’s entire illicit hoard of goodies comes tumbling forth, a sack of flour falling on the floor, followed by tins of corned beef, packets of Bath Oliver biscuits, jars of Bovril and a pack of dried apricots which promptly bursts and scatters numerous sticky fruits all over the floor where Miss Mapp’s astonished guests tread on them, getting them stuck to the soles of their shoes. Diva watches all this from a distance, absolutely delighted that she in no way can be blamed for the disaster:

The birthday of her life had come! (p.99)

Extremely typical of Miss Mapp and the whole world Benson has invented is the way Miss Mapp proceeds to cover herself by making up a cock-and-bull story about all these goodies, far from being hoarding – goodness me, no, dear Diva – was ‘my poor little Christmas presents for your needy parishioners, Padre’. Nobody believes her for a moment, but face is saved, a little.

The secret drinkers

A recurring comic theme is that both Major Flint and Captain Puffin are observed to stay up very late at night i.e. their bedroom lights are on till way past 11. They tell the town that they are ardently pursuing very serious studies, namely that the Major is editing the diaries of his imperial service in India while the Captain is carrying out in-depth researches into Roman roads and ruins. Miss Mapp, seeing herself in the role of a Guardian Angel, keeps a beady eye on their late lights and is always telling these old men (the Major is, in fact, only 54) that they should keep more regular hours and conduct their studies healthily, in the morning.

Except that half-way through the novel, after playing one of their rounds of golf, Flint and Puffin, hilariously confess to each other that neither of them are conducting these famous studies: Flint never kept a diary in India, Puffin knows next to nothing about Roman archaeology, they just stay up late drinking. So they resolve to henceforward do so in company, and take to visiting each other’s houses on alternate evenings. It becomes a schoolboyish private joke between them.

The Major said, ‘Well, I’ll step across, shall I, about half-past nine, and bring my diaries with me?
‘I’ll expect you. You’ll find me at my Roman roads.’
The humour of this joke never staled, and they parted with hoots and guffaws of laughter. (p.168)

This late-night drinking emerges as an unexpectedly major theme of the story. First of all, Miss Mapp, observing that at least one of their lights now goes off in the mid-evening on alternating evenings, is convinced that her words of advice are working half the time and the poor military men are getting early nights at least half the week. But the major outcome of these convivial nights together is the huge argument which leads to the duel!

The duel that never was

The argument On one particular night they are at Major Flint’s and the two men’s shabby genteel poverty triggers an argument about who is drinking most of the Captain’s bottle of whiskey. Like all their arguments it quickly escalates until the Captain drunkenly staggers out of Flint’s bedroom and across the street to his own house. He passes out on his bed. Early in the morning he hears the metallic clink of the flap of his letterbox, stumbles out of bed, and discovers the Major has hand delivered a challenge to a duel!

Sir,
My seconds will wait on you in the course of to-morrow morning.
Your faithful obedient servant.
Benjamin Flint

Captain Puffin panics He staggers back to bed and passes out but wakes up a few hours in the grip of fear, then panic. What if it’s literally true? The Major is a much better shot than him! It’s an invitation to certain death. In a hungover panic he packs his bags, leaves a note for the maid, and staggers out carrying a big Gladstone bag and along to the station to catch the first train to London, the 6.30am.

Meeting at Tilling train station Arriving 15 minutes early he undergoes agonies of anxiety when he hears heavy footsteps and… it is Major Flint, also carrying a big bag, arriving to catch the same train! Long story short, they both realise they are cowards and are running away from the duel which Flint so rashly threatened. After a few moments’ embarrassment they burst into laughter, agree never to be so silly again, and set off for the golf course where they go to play every day.

Word gets round However – Captain Puffin was silly enough to leave Major Flint’s note threatening the duel on his mantelpiece at home, where it is discovered later in the morning by Puffin’s maid, who promptly rings up Flint’s maid, they both discover their masters are absent, and word spreads like wildfire that the two men have gone off to the sand dunes near the gold course to fight a duel. When word spreads to the Mapp circle the vicar gets dragged in and ends up volunteering to rush off to the dunes to try and prevent a potentially tragic loss of life.

Vicar to the rescue He takes a taxi (agonising over the unwonted expense) and then spends the whole morning timidly peeping his head over the brow of every dune, half expecting to get it shot off by a stray bullet or, worse, coming across the bodies of one of the shot men. After an exhausting and anxious morning, hot and dirty and sweaty, the vicar arrives at the golf course proper, where he sees… Flint and Puffin just completing their morning game of golf in a jovial and merry way, and they invite him for drinks at the club. Comedy!

Anxious anticipation It doesn’t even end there because the good ladies of Tilling, now thoroughly alerted to news of the duel, are on tenterhooks back in town to find out what has happened. Miss Mapp carefully works out about ten possible scenarios and variations, which the text carefully numbers and describes, involving numbers of stretchers and bodies and doctors in attendance on the poor men etc. Imagine her disappointment when the after lunch tram arrives only for Major Flint, Captain Puffin and the vicar to all step off it large as life and obviously hale and hearty. More comedy!

Hippopotamus Incidentally, at the height of the squabble which started it all, Captain Puffin in his drunkenness struggled to pronounce the word ‘hippopotamus’ and they and the narrator all refer back to it as ‘the hippopotamus quarrel’ (p.165).

Was it for a woman? The duel gag continues for quite a long time, Benson stretches it out further than you’d think possible, which is itself an old comic trick but it’s also distinctively Bensonite to show how even trivial incidents have long, complex ramifications in such a closed, paranoid society of hyper-alert, hyper-curious people.

Was the duel for her? Because Miss Mapp can’t let this incident of the duel alone, and one aspect which dogs her is what was the duel about? She leaps to the sentimental conclusion that it must have been about a woman (instead of its banal real cause, which was squabbling about who’d drunk most whiskey from Captain Puffin’s bottle). And it’s only a small step from there to conclude that the pair must have been preparing to fight a duel… over her!

Spreading the word Yes, Miss Mapp leaps to the hilariously inapt conclusion that the two men must have been fighting a duel over her. It would be moderately comic if she just harboured this heroic misconception to herself and acted accordingly but instead, this being Tilling, and a Benson novel, she has to let everyone know and sets out on a campaign the next morning to accidentally-on-purpose bump into all the usual characters in the high street, and one by one take them into her confidence about the true nature of the duel i.e. her. This ramifies out for a bit before, with comic inevitability, she discovers she most definitely was not the subject of their argument and undergoes yet another self-inflicted humiliation.

Realisation Which triggers more intensive speculation about the real reason both men were seen at Tilling railway station at 6.30 on that fateful morning. And then she has the breakthrough and realises they were both running away. Far from being the heroic men of action she had painted them in her ‘duelling over her’ narrative, now they appear as two lily-livered weaklings. Once again she sallies forth to spread the gossip, buttonholing everyone she meets.

Daily gossip For the nature of Tilling gossip (or of this narrative) is that the best way to quash a rumour or news which humiliates you (the clashing dresses, the secret hoarding, the ‘they were fighting over me’ fiasco) is to replace it with an even juicier piece of gossip. And so she sallies forth again and tells Diva who is gossip on legs and soon the two men’s arrant cowardice is universally known.

By eleven o’clock that morning, the two duellists were universally known as ‘the cowards’, the Padre alone demurring, and being swampingly outvoted. (p.181)

With the result that when they arrive back from their morning golf they find themselves greeted by everyone with fake smiles and ironic references to early morning trains. So that it doesn’t take long for the pair to realise they’re secret is out and for them, in their turn, to consider how to win back Tilling opinion.

Anthropology

And so it rolls on: an endless list of incidents and events which each trigger intense scrutiny from, in particular, Miss Mapp and her frenemy Diva Plaistow, which give rise to feverish speculation and whispered gossip, generally leading to heroic misconceptions or campaigns, which result in the protagonist (generally Miss Mapp’s) very public humiliation; before everyone gets up the next morning and prepares for another day of warfare.

There’s serious articles to be written about the Mapp and Lucia novels viewed through the prism of anthropology, a Darwinian take on status and hierarchy in primate groups, a small clan riven by unending competition and minute analysis of everyone else’s actions and possible motives, an over-attention which converts everyone – in Benson’s comically hyperbolic style – into an analyst, strategist, campaigner and diplomat.

My quick view would be that Benson’s novels demonstrate how immensely overpowered our brains are for most of the situations we find ourselves in. I find myself using the modern phrase ‘over-thinking’ quite a lot at work but, in a sense, don’t all humans over-think everything? Life is pretty simple and yet you only need two people (in a relationship, say) and already you have a world of misunderstandings and confusions; add in one more, then another, then another, and you quickly have a chaos of misunderstandings, misconceptions, mixed messages and so on, and you are in Bensonworld.

Benson has put his finger on something very profound about human nature and created these big (the novels are all quite long and pretty dense) comic edifices out of human beings’ fatal tendency to over-think more or less everything.

And so on…

This takes us up to about page 200 of this 270-page long book. There’s more, as the season moves from high summer into the autumn, on to rainy winter, through an eventful Christmas and on into the new year, namely:

– A reprise of the dress war, wherein Miss Mapp and Diva yet again humiliatingly appear at social events with matching outfits:

Over the background of each mind was spread a hatred of the other, red as their tea-gowns, and shot with black despair as to what on earth they should do now with those ill-fated pieces of pride.

– The arrival of Mr Wyse’s sister, the grand Contessa, from Italy, on page 215, and all the ripples that causes. Mostly because she is completely uninhibited, speaks her mind about everything and is generally free of the terribly English curtain-twitching restraints all the ladies have imposed upon themselves:

Miss Mapp’s head was in a whirl. The Contessa said in the loudest possible voice all that everybody else only whispered. (p.232)

– And Mrs Poppit and Mr Wyse falling in love! with the vast scope for gossip and anticipation and misunderstanding which this entails.

– And, right at the end, a tragic and unexpected loss.

All embroidered at every stage, with the wild speculations, detailed analyses, cunning plans and clever strategising of Miss Mapp and various other Tillingites. But I’ll stop my summary here. There’s plenty more in the same vein, and you can read it online (link below).

Prose style

P.G. Wodehouse achieves his comic effects with a prose style which is as light and airy as his brainless characters. Benson is the exact opposite. His style is heavy and clotted and dense in order to reflect his characters’ never-ending scheming and plotting. His paragraphs can sometimes take up a whole page and his sentences can be very long, made up of numerous sub-clauses. Here’s just one sentence from early in the text:

General manœuvres in Tilling, the gradual burstings of fluttering life from the chrysalis of the night, the emergence of the ladies of the town with their wicker-baskets in their hands for housekeeping purchases, the exodus of men to catch the 11.20 a.m. steam-tram out to the golf links, and other first steps in the duties and diversions of the day, did not get into full swing till half-past ten, and Miss Mapp had ample time to skim the headlines of her paper and indulge in chaste meditations about the occupants of these two houses, before she need really make herself alert to miss nothing.

Much information has to be fitted in, and in a way which reflects the cluttered, busy, even hectic physical activities of the town and mental activities of its key inhabitants. Here’s a description of all Mrs Poppit’s guests maliciously wanting her to carry on talking about receiving her MBE so that she reveals herself as not understanding Tilling’s values of discretion and understatement

One reason for this, of course, as already indicated, was that they all longed for her to expose herself as much as she possibly could, for if there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness: there were, no doubt, in the great world with which Tilling concerned itself so little kings and queens and dukes and Members of the Order of the British Empire; but every Tillingite knew that he or she (particularly she) was just as good as any of them, and indeed better, being more fortunate than they in living in Tilling…

Benson’s cluttered prose bespeaks an older, Victorian cast of mind, heavy and heavily decorated, ornate and over-furnished – except that instead of earnest Victorian moralising, Benson deploys it for comic purposes, each qualifying clause adding to the exquisite precision with which he itemises the micro-snobberies and mini aggressions of his venomous ladies.

Camp

Benson was gay. A lot of the famous fans who signed a petition to his publishers to republish the Mapp and Lucia novels after his death (in 1940) were themselves gay writers who loved the deeply camp, exaggerated bitchiness of all the characters.

My wife read the books when at school and tells me she never believed they were about women, bearing no relation to the women she knew in her household or extended family, at school or anywhere else. To her, it all read as gay male camp bitchiness. I’m no expert, so I’ll go along with her view. For me the comic bitchiness and endless rivalry is adequately embedded in the women characters, if that makes sense. It’s only very rarely that Benson applies even the minutest hint of campness to any of the male characters who are, by and large, solidly heterosexual e.g. the blustering major and quarrelsome captain and well-meaning vicar. Algernon Wyse is the exception that proves the general rule.

Without being in the least effeminate, Mr. Wyse this morning looked rather like a modern Troubadour. He had a velveteen coat on, a soft, fluffy, mushy tie which looked as if made of Shirley poppies, very neat knickerbockers, brown stockings with blobs, like the fruit of plane trees, dependent from elaborate ‘tops’, and shoes with a cascade of leather frilling covering the laces.

Why mention effeminacy at all unless, unconsciously, to draw attention to it?

Curiosity

The books can be seen as a reflection on the very human failing of curiosity, raised to a kind of pathological intensity, whipped up into a pathological and damaging obsession, and all the funnier for it.

[Miss Mapp’s] face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends…

Miss Mapp was seething with excitement, curiosity and rage…

The Padre was bursting with curiosity, but since his delicacy forbade him to ask any of the questions which effervesced like sherbet round his tongue, he propounded another plan.

Until she arrived at some sort of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble…

Curiosity rushed like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp’s mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now…

Sometimes she took him into a shop in case there might be someone there who had not seen him yet on her leash; sometimes she left him on the pavement in a prominent position, marking, all the time, just as if she had been a clinical thermometer, the feverish curiosity that was burning in Tilling’s veins.

1920s slang

‘Ho! That’s how you got the idea then,’ said Diva. ‘I knew you had cribbed it from me.’
‘Cribbed?’ asked Miss Mapp, in ironical ignorance of what so vulgar and slangy an expression meant.
‘Cribbed means taking what isn’t yours,’ said Diva.

After the duel that never was, the gossips of Tilling hope:

that the whole affair was not, in the delicious new slang phrase of the Padre’s, which was spreading like wildfire through Tilling, a ‘wash-out‘. (p.126)

Used later:

Puffin said, ‘But I don’t see what you’re in such a taking about. We’re no worse off than we were before we got a reputation for being such fire-eaters. Being fire-eaters is a wash-out, that’s all. Pleasant while it lasted, and now we’re as we were.’ (p.184)

American slang:

Was there not some sort of corn called pop-corn, which Americans ate? (p.128)

And our old friend ‘cat’, meaning bitchy gossipy woman, which I first came across widespread in the works of Noel Coward.

Puffin yawned. ‘Mapp’s a cat,’ he said. ‘Stroke a cat and you’ll get scratched. Shy a brick at a cat, and she’ll spit at you and skedaddle.’

Lolz

In the church at Christmastime, Miss Mapp:

sat in her usual seat close below the pulpit, and the sun streaming in through a stained glass window opposite made her face of all colours, like Joseph’s coat. Not knowing how it looked from outside, she pictured to herself a sort of celestial radiance coming from within, though Diva, sitting opposite, was reminded of the iridescent hues observable on cold boiled beef. (p.241)

Credit

‘Miss Mapp’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1922. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

• Miss Mapp on Planet Gutenberg
• The E.F. Benson Society

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)