Our Family Affairs

First edition, first impression.  342pp, with black and white portrait plate frontispiece and further black and white plate illustrations interleaved in text.  Brown cloth-covered boards with gilt titles.  8vo.  Covers very worn and faded, with signs of damp staining on rear panel, backstrip absent.  Text block edges a little browned.  Previous owner’s name neatly inked above a bookplate on the front paste down. Endpapers unevenly toned and both hinges cracked.  Library lending sheet pasted onto the rear paste down (no other library markings).  Some faint spotting on first and last few leaves else internally generally neat and clean.

A poignant exploration of Victorian family dynamics as the English novelist and writer (and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson) E F Benson lays bare his own family’s history of the latter years of the 19th century.  Benson is best remembered for this Mapp and Lucia series of and for supernatural horror stories.  E F Benson was the younger bother of A C Benson, himself a writer. and of the amateur Egyptologist Mary Benson.