Publisher's Synopsis
Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer and short story writer best known for his Mapp and Lucia series, social satires written relatively late in his career which are set in the fictional town of Tilling based on Rye in East Sussex where Benson lived for many years and served as mayor from 1934. The novels recount humorous incidents in the lives of upper middle-class characters who vie for social prestige and one-upmanship in an atmosphere of extreme cultural snobbery. He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversail Dodo (1898) which was an instant success and featured a scathing description of composer and militant suffragette Ethel Smyth. Dodo's success was repeated in 1914 with the publication of Dodo the Second (Dodo's Daughter in the US, 1913) with the same cast of characters and described a 'a unique chronicle of the pre-1914 Bright Young Things', and then Dodo Wonders (1921), 'a first-hand social history of the Great War in Mayfair and the Shires.'
