(The Complete Mapp & Lucia : Volume Two (Wordsworth Classics

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Lucia is one of the great comic characters in English literature. Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and snobbish, Queen Lucia, ‘as by right divine’ rules over the toy kingdom of ‘Riseholme’ based on the Cotswold village of Broadway. Her long-suffering husband Pepino is ‘her prince-consort’, the outrageously camp Georgie is her ‘gentleman-in-waiting’, the village green is her ‘parliament’, and her subjects, such as Daisy Quantock, are hapless would-be ‘Bolsheviks’. In Lucia in London, the prudish, manically ambitious Lucia launches herself into the louche world of London society.

Her earnest determination to learn all about ‘modern movements’ makes her the perfect comic vehicle for Benson’s free-wheeling satire of salon society, and of the dominant fads and movements of the 1920s, including vegetarianism, yoga, palmistry, Freudianism, seances, Post-Impressionist art and Christian Science….