the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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E. F. Benson : Dodo

Monday 3 March 1930: 'Rodmell again [...] Suppose health were shown on a thermometer I have gone up 10 degrees since yesterday, when I lay, mumbling the bones of Dodo: if it had bones'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Print: Book

E. F. Benson : As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show

Saturday 27 December 1930: 'We came down [to Rodmell] on Tuesday, & next day my cold was the usual influenza, & I am in bed with the usual temperature [...] I moon torpidly through book after book: Defoe's Tour; Rowan's auto[biograph]y; Benson's Memoirs; Jeans; in the familiar way [...] Oh & I've read Q[ueen]. V[ictoria]'s letters [...] Q.V. entirely unaesthetic; a kind of Prussian competence, & belief in herself her only prominences [...] Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Print: Book

E. F. Benson : Final Edition, an Informal Autobiography

Friday 1 November 1940: 'My Times book this week is E. F. Benson's last autobigraphy [...] I learn there the perils of glibness.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Print: Book

E. F. Benson : Queen Victoria

I am just now reading Benson's life of Queen Victoria and can't help feeling that if we had old Lord Palmerston now he would probably close the canal and have done with it: after all why should one sit still and watch a big man knock a little one down and never move a finger?

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Freya Stark      Print: Book

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