Edward Frederic Benson, Mapp and Lucia Novels

Mapp and Lucia is a collective name for a series of novels by E. F. Benson, and is also the name of a television series based on those novels. Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 - 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. His friends called him Fred. The novels feature humorous incidents in the lives of (mainly) upper-middle-class British people in the 1920s and 1930s, vying for social prestige and "one-upmanship" in an atmosphere of extreme cultural snobbery. Several of them are set in the small seaside town of Tilling, closely based on Rye, East Sussex, where Benson lived for a number of years and (like Lucia) served as mayor. Lucia previously lived at Riseholme, based on Broadway, Worcestershire, from where she brought to Tilling her celebrated recipe for Lobster à la Riseholme.