I’ve loved the Mapp and Lucia series for years. Jonathan just recently read them too and got this book through InterLibrary Loan (thanks, Amy!). He recommended it to me and I loved it. Not quite up to Mapp and Lucia standards, but full of all Benson’s favorite caricatures. Pompous Colonel Chase is obsessed with how many miles he can bicycle and walk (if his pedometer breaks and he can’t say exactly how many miles he walked when he gets back to the boarding house, he’s in a temper). Miss Howard:
…and now at the age of forty, though she had parted with her youth, she had relinquished no atom of her girlishness. She hardly ever walked but tripped, she warbled little snatches of song when she though anyone might be within hearing in order to refresh them with her maidenly brightness, and sat on the hearth rug in front of the fire, even though there was a far more comfortable seat ready. It was not that she felt any profound passion for tripping, warbling, squatting, but from constantly telling herself that she was barely out of her teens she had got to believe in her girlishness and behave accordingly.
Then there’s Mrs. Bliss, Manual of Mental Science devotee, who can’t smile any more largely when something good happens than she does at all other times. Benson has the ability to build an enthralling plot on a tiny, petty incident like a lost pedometer or Miss Howard’s exaggerations about her “little place” in Tunbridge Wells, and to make me love reading about characters who have no redeeming qualities and whom I would never want to spend time with. Sheer enjoyment. I wish there were more books like this.