Thoughts on things...

5. Mapp and Lucia

I always find a peculiar pleasure in imagining fictional characters in a real-life setting. It somehow enhances their immortality. I wrote in an earlier post that I had pictured Harriet Vane, researching her study of Sheridan Le Fanu, during a recent visit to the Bodleian library, and I never emerge from South Ken underground without wondering which of those large white semi-detached buildings was, in 1954, the rooming-house setting for Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington.

More specific than these, however, is the residence of Miss Elizabeth Mapp and Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, twin drivers of the six Mapp and Lucia novels, written by E. F. Benson between 1920 and 1939.

During this period Benson was living at Lamb House, in the town of Rye in East Sussex, a fine early Georgian property that is now with the National Trust. Its beautiful garden was encouraged on its way by Benson’s friend, Henry James, who owned the house and wrote The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl while living there. Later it belonged to Rumer Godden.

It was also the property of Miss Mapp; who rented it to the recently-widowed Lucia; who subsequently became its owner.

Rye is an absolute delight, but nothing there delighted me more than finding the home of those two women: ‘Mallards’, as it is called in the novels, the foremost residence in the town of ‘Tilling’, a representation of Rye that is one of the most gorgeous artistic constructs in comic literature.