Paying Guests

Edward Frederic Benson OBE (24 July 1867 - 29 February 1940) was a novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian, and short story writer from the United Kingdom. E. F. Benson was the fifth child of Wellington College's headmaster, Edward White Benson (after chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, Bishop of Truro, and Archbishop of Canterbury), and his wife, Mary Sidgwick ("Minnie"). E. F. Benson was the younger brother of Arthur Christopher Benson, who penned "Land of Hope and Glory," Robert Hugh Benson, who wrote several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson (Maggie), a novelist and amateur Egyptologist. Benson attended Temple Grove School and subsequently Marlborough College, where he composed some of his early writings and based his novel David Blaize. He pursued his schooling at Cambridge's King's College. He was a member of the Pitt Club at Cambridge and later became an honorary fellow of Magdalene College. Benson was a gifted and prolific writer. Sketches from Marlborough, his first book, was published while he was still a student. He began his novel-writing career with the (then) fashionable controversial Dodo (1893), which was an instant success, and went on to write a range of satire, romantic and supernatural melodrama, and fantasy.