Welcome to Litsy!

This is a book about a prominent Victorian family of writers in Englandthe Bensons. The cast of characters includes Edward White Benson, the archbishop of Canterbury (1883-1896); his wife, the lesbian writer Mary Sidgwick Benson, to whom he proposed marriage when she was only twelve; and their six children, none of whom, Goldhill says, ever had heterosexual intercourse, as far as we can tell; certainly none of them ever married. Apart from two children who died young, the rest grew up to become prominent writers or go nutsor both. Every one of them was high-strung, precocious, rebellious, and quirky. The most famous of the siblings was Fred Benson, who was openly gay and a competitive figure skater and who wrote a line of successful comic novels that was eventually made into the BBC TV series Mapp and Lucia in the 1980s. But Goldhill is skeptical of the veracity of standard biographical narrative. So he lets the family tell their own story as much as he can: after all, together they wrote more than 200 books, many intended to present a public picture of the famous family. More importantly, they wrote many thousands of intimate letters among themselves, and they obsessively corrected oversights and lies in the books through hand-written marginalia in family copies. Goldhill stresses how this family of graphomaniacs constantly used their writing to tell and retell the stories of their lives, to themselves, to each other and to a broader public. "