Free Download Books Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

E.F. Benson

Paperback | Pages: 1136 pages

Rating: 4.41 | 970 Users | 73 Reviews

Details Books Conducive To Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

Original Title:	Make Way for Lucia
ISBN:	0060915080 (ISBN13: 9780060915087)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6, Mapp and Lucia #4

Explanation In Pursuance Of Books Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

E. F. Benson apparently had two obsessions: ghost stories, and high society, with an unrelenting hatred of social climbers. The distant rumbles of Bolshevism and the nearer-at-home threat of Black Shirts and incipient Nazis don't stir him to the heat of indignation that he reserves for middle class people pretending to a rank to which they are not entitled; a great many of his short stories are savage satires of bumptious mushrooms trying to shoulder their way into society, to the extent of certain plots being revisited repeatedly.

His stories about the tempests in the teapots of Riseholme and Tilling are not silver fork novels. The denizens of these two towns all have cooks and maids, but the people are decidedly bourgeois, and get flustered in the presence of noble titles, whether the humans wearing the titles deserve it or not. There is nothing silver fork about the gleefully funny satire of Mrs. Poppit returning in triumph to Tilling with her Order of the British Empire, and her description of her triumphant visit to the king and queen.

The Lucia and Mapp stories are twenties and thirties English comedy of manners, whereas his early novel about Dodo was very much in the silver fork tradition. In fact, in some ways I think Mapp and Lucia define twenties and thirties comedies of manners in a way that even Noel Coward didn't quite achieve, judging by the number of references I've picked up in collections of letters, memoirs, diaries, and the occasional obscure reference in a cozy mystery or other type of novel of the period.

I end up taking these out and rereading them whenever, like now, I've got a cold and can't wrap my brain around anything else, but I've reread all my Austens and PG Wodehouse too recently.

I also don't read them all the way through. For example, I usually skip over Lucia in London, which is an entire novel about Lucia playing the snob and being made fun of behind her back. I can only stand humiliation stories if I have no sympathy whatever with the victim, and I like silly Lucia (who does have a good heart in the clinch) too much to enjoy her being slow roasted by this smug collection of duchesses and countesses. And the ultimate chapter (view spoiler)[ which plot Benson reuses several times in his short stories, in which a homosexual society journalist is tricked into the bedroom of a social climber who is actually quite prudish (hide spoiler)] is exceptionally painful rather than entertaining.

That said, I rejoice in the foiling of Elizabeth Mapp, as she does not in any sense have a good heart. The small doings of Tilling are even more fun than Riseholme's tempests, which I think Benson realized, because he soon brings Lucia and Georgie Pillson to Tilling, whence he proceeds to pit the two female titans against each other, one winning, then the other, with generally (I am glad to say) Lucia coming out the better.

It's surprising, just how much subversive fun Benson has playing around with gender roles. There are some married couples, and a sprinkling of widows, but except for Mrs. Boucher, who managed to produce the peculiar daughters Piggy and Goosie, and Susan Poppit, whose vegetarian, suntanning daughter is around briefly in Tilling until she fades off somewhere, there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone in either Riseholme or Tilling's high society knows anything about sex.

Georgie Pillson, who at first appears to be a rather effeminate Bertie Wooster, takes on some depth and complexity during the Olga Bracely episodes (it is clear that she, at least, lives life to the full in all senses). Irene Coles of Tilling is unrepentantly lesbian, cavorting happily through the stories until she paints a picture so heavily ironic that it is voted Picture of the Year by the Royal Academy, a painting so jaw-droppingly awful that it is regarded as genius.

In both the marriages made in Tilling, between the horrible Elizabeth Mapp and the boozy but weak Major Benjy, and then Lucia and Georgie, it is quite clear that the female wears the pants. (Or as Lucia and Georgie decide after the Mapp-Flint marriage, they wear one trouser leg each), yet Georgie is the only one who can halt Lucia's worst high flights, and it is clear that matrimony for them is very happy in its mutual innocence. Unlike Elizabeth and Major Benjy, whose silent matrimonial duel never quite achieves a lasting truce.

Some of the best chapters are about the smallest incidents, such as the War of the Poppies, and especially the tightly, brilliantly plotted chapter concerning hoarding. A little poking into Benson's life provides the information that Tilling is based on Rye, a picturesque town in which the most picturesque house was his, once belonging to Henry James. Mapp is given this house, where she rules in dingy parsimony until Lucia takes it over and makes it gracious. I wonder how many of the characters of Tilling are based on residents of Rye, or if Benson put together characteristics of all those he met over the course of a lifetime. One thing for sure, Lucia and Georgie, Elizabeth and Diva, Olga Bracely and all the others are distinctive and endlessly fun.

Present Containing Books Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

Title	:	Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)
Author	:	E.F. Benson
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 1136 pages
Published	:	October 1st 1988 by HarperCollins (first published 1939)
Categories	:	Fiction. Humor. Classics. European Literature. British Literature

Rating Containing Books Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

Ratings: 4.41 From 970 Users | 73 Reviews

Critique Containing Books Make Way for Lucia (The Mapp & Lucia Novels #1-6)

I'm adding this book years after I read it, but certain cherished passages inevitably recur in my fading memory, especially as I'm now reading Saki and Sōseki's I Am A Cat.For years I sniffed at Benson's Lucia novels, somehow imagining that I was above them, that they were the sort of thing old queens who loved Ronald Firbank would read. Well, maybe they are but I was wrong about myself. When I pick up this doorstop of a book, I can only echo the Foreword by Anne Parrish: "although my copies

This book forever to read, but was worth it. I enjoyed the humour, and it's a very different type of read for me.

I've read it, and read it again, and again, and again. Now I'm reading it again. This is likely the only book I have read as many times. I can predict the dialogue and narrative as it happens. And yet I keep wanting to read it again. Can you tell I love all of the Lucia and Mapp books? One of the things that happens every time for me is that my opinion of Lucia changes from bad to good every time as I meet Miss Mapp. Benson does a fine job of creating a society where the main characters have

This is the all-time sure-fire depression cure! Whenever I have the blues, I dip into this book. The War of the Chintz Roses; Mapp's underhanded efforts to steal the recipe for Lobster a la Riseholme, Georgie's beard, and Diva striving to keep her place as Queen of the Fete...A hysterical comedy of manners, set in Britain between the wars.

The GR description of this book is incorrect -- this is NOT the stage adaptation but is an omnibus edition of the complete 6 novels in the Lucia series as written by E.F. Benson.

It took me years, starting way back in the 70s, to find all the Mapp & Lucia books! If my house caught on fire, they would probably be the first things I would grab to save, that's how much I love them. I can pick one up...any one of them, and just open it to any page and start reading! I have never tired of them. They are about the time and places in England I want to visit. My copies are all beat up from so much use!

I have just finished rereading the complete Mapp and Lucia series and, though I would have thought it beyond the bounds of possibility, I enjoyed it even more second-time around. There are six books in the series (seven counting the included short story). Whilst each is stand-alone, they are best read in sequence and what pure delight there is in store for those at the start of this hilarious immersion into middle-class, small-town England. Though the Great War is only just behind them, the