Edward Frederic Benson

E. F. Benson, born Edward Frederic Benson in 1867 and died in 1940, was an English novelist, biographer and writer of ghost stories. He wrote in English and came from a prominent Victorian family: his father became Archbishop of Canterbury, and several of his siblings also published books. He matters for pairing a sharp social comedy with unsettling tales of the supernatural in the years between the wars.

He was educated at Marlborough and at King's College, Cambridge, where he began publishing early. His first novel, Dodo (1893), was an immediate success with its satirical portrait of upper-class society, and it was followed by satires, romances and melodramas. Later he settled in Rye, in East Sussex, whose streets inspired the fictional town of Tilling in the Mapp and Lucia novels, the comic series for which he is best remembered.

His ghost stories avoid the usual Gothic castles and prefer ordinary settings, a restraint that made them distinctive alongside those of his friend M. R. James. Benson's reputation rests largely on the Mapp and Lucia books, still widely reread for their dry wit, and on his supernatural fiction, which continues to appear in anthologies.