Books with author E F. 1867-1940 Benson

The Classic Occult Thriller. "Why shouldn't there be a fairy Abracadabra? If you believed a thing enough, it became real, with a few trifling exceptions." -E. F. Benson There is a very large class of persons alive to-day who believe that not only is communication with the dead possible, but that they themselves have had actual experience of it. Many of these are eminent in scientific research, and on any other subject the world in general would accept their evidence. There is possibly a larger class of persons who hold that all such communications, if genuine, come not from the dead but from the devil. This is the taught opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. A third class, far more numerous than both of these, is sure that any one who holds either of these beliefs is a dupe of conjurers, or the victim of his own disordered brain. This type of robust intellect has, during the last ten decades, affirmed that hypnotism, aviation in machines heavier than air, telepathy, wireless telegraphy, and other non-proved phenomena, are superstitious and unscientific balderdash. In an earlier century it was equally certain that the earth did not go round the sun. It is, happily, never disconcerted by the frequency with which the superstitions and impossibilities of one generation become the science of the next. The first part of this book may be accepted by the first of these three classes, the second by the second, and none of it by the third. Its aim is to state rather than solve the subject with which it deals, and to suggest that the dead and the devil alike may be able to communicate with the living.

[Library Edition Audiobook CD in Vinyl case.][Read by Nadia May -aka- Wanda McCaddon] Told with his usual dry British wit, E. F. Benson gives us the first tale in his classic 'Mapp and Lucia' series. England between the wars was a paradise of calm and leisure for the very, very rich. Into this enclave is born Mrs. Emmeline Lucas - La Lucia, as she is known - a woman determined to lead a life quite different from the subdued formality of her class. With her cohort, Georgie Pillson, and her husband, Peppino, Lucia upends the greats of high society: the imperious Lady Ambermere and her equally imperious dog, Pug; the odious Piggy and Goosie Antrobus; the Christian Scientist Daisy Quantrock, with her penchant for the foreign; and all the rest of the small English town that the British rich call their country home. Beset on all sides by pretenders to her social throne, Lucia brings culture, fine art, excitement, and intrigue into this cloistered realm.

Queen Lucia is a humorous delightful book. E F Benson was a 19th century English biographer, novelist, short story writer, and memoirist. Benson wrote several ghost stories. His Mapp and Lucia series is his best known work. Lucia's supremacy as the social and cultural queen of an English village is challenged when one friend discovers an Indian guru and begins yoga lessons. Olga a beautiful diva comes to challenge Lucia's rule over the gentry of Riseholme. Lucia's ego is challenged by the guru who is a fraud and her Italian which is also fraudulent.