E. F. Benson

E. F. Benson was a novelist, biographer, memoirist, and ghost-story writer whose range extended from mythology to exquisitely observed social comedy. The Valkyries appeared in 1903 as his prose rendering of the libretto for Richard Wagner's Die Walküre. Benson's preface explains that he wanted English readers to encounter the drama's story apart from its music; T. Noyes Lewis supplied illustrations for the T. Fisher Unwin edition. Miss Mapp, published in 1922, works on a more domestic scale. In the fictional town of Tilling, Elizabeth Mapp monitors neighbors, fashions, bridge games, and minor advantages with comic intensity. The novel follows Queen Lucia within the sequence later called Mapp and Lucia, although the two rivals do not meet until the 1931 novel Mapp and Lucia. Benson lived at Lamb House in Rye, which informed Tilling and Miss Mapp's home. Across The Valkyries and Miss Mapp, his narrative skill operates in opposite registers: one translates mythic conflict into prose, while the other magnifies local gossip into social warfare.