Miss Mapp

By: E. Benson

An excerpt of a review from The Bookman , Volume 63 [1922] : MR. BENSON has made a narrative out of what are usually regarded as the trimmings of a novel, the small circumstances, the everyday conversations, the hourly happenings of ordinary people. Tilling is a quiet township which no event from the outside world disturbs and gossip is its daily food. With his picture of Miss Mapp, Mr. Benson has achieved a big success. Of age about forty, a woman in whom the vivifying emotions of anger and curiosity have preserved an astonishing activity of mind and body, she sits at her window that looks out on the High Street of the town. From this strategic position nothing of importance escapes her notice. With the data supplied by the window she embarks on schemes that direct the whole course of the township's life. It is surprising how quickly Miss Mapp's curiosity about her neighbours becomes our own. The Tilling atmosphere is very pervading. Before fifty pages are past we are agreeing with Captain Puffin that "the sweet amenities of village life, its pleasant conversations and companionships, its topped drives and incalculable incidents wear a glamour and a preciousness that are bound up with life itself." The book is very clever and highly diverting. It is more clever and more diverting in the earlier than in the later pages, because Mr. Benson has not been able wholly to overcome the difficulty of continuing to make the commonplace interesting. The trivial, losing for a moment the godlike qualities with which he has invested it, shows feet of clay. The intricacies of Mr. Benson's workmanship are interesting to watch. In drawing his characters he is more concerned with their actual thoughts than with the elegances of expression in which convention cloaks their words, though no one can repeat more mellifluously than he the inanities of village gossip. He shows us processes of mind whose interplay is swifter and more uniform in pattern than speech. Shut the book and argue that most of its biggest scenes are storms in tea-cups. Might not the energies which Miss Mapp uses to find whether she is being asked to the Poppits' bridge-party as a stop-gap or as an honoured guest have been applied to finer purpose? Mr. Benson is at liberty to reply that while we are among the tea-cups of Tilling the storm is very real.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1499388160
• ISBN13: 9781499388169
• Release Date: May 2014
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"