Sunday 17 February 1980

Lady Massington's Resurrection

Volume of short stories

Published (?) 1895


Well, here's a mystery.

In early 1895 the publishers Methuen & Co. announced the appearance of a new work by EFB: Lady Massington's Resurrection, and Other Stories (crown 8vo. 6s.) ~ mentions found in the end papers of a book titled Battles of English History by H. B. George (dated 01/1895), and in the Pall Mall Gazette's 'Literary Notes' of 16/02/1895.

A Mrs Massington appears in one of the novels ~ I don't know which and am too lazy to go hunting for it.

And I've found this mention in the EFB papers held by UCLA:

Box 5, Folder 64

Lady Massington's redemption.

Physical Description: 57pp., 26 cm, typescript, holograph corrections.

Scope and Content Note

Typescript title Lady Massington's resurrection, the last word crossed out and redemtion written by hand.
Text begins, The tide of carriages in St. James' Street had just turned...

But apart from that ~

nothing.

Friday 1 February 1980

"Books That Have Helped Great Men": E F Benson's Selection

My favourite film Heathcliff (Timothy Dalton)
On 22nd October 1927 The Spectator asked some 'great men' to name the books that had most influenced them:
Mr. E. F. Benson adds a philosophical aside to his selection : "No book that is worth reading ever had anything but a bad influence on any author. What he invariably picks up (if he picks up anything) is its defects. Its merits are always the incommunicable secret of the individual writer. But usually he picks up nothing. The three books that have thus most influenced me are: (1) Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort, by Pierre Loti. I derived from it a poisonous streak of sentimentality. (2) Othmai, by Ouida, from which I caught an adolescent habit of 'rich' description. (3) Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, from which I learned clumsy mechanism."
 Just thought I'd mention it. 

Ouida (Louisa de la Ramée)