An Autumn Sowing

by E F Benson

Overview

The story of Thomas Keeling, pillar of Bracebridge society and how life and love can appear in the most uncertain places. E. F. Benson creates the stuffy and strict world of Edwardian Britain so well that the idea of love or romance seems so unlikely and out of place. Including a biography of the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781718637733
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	05/02/2018
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER II Mr Keeling was accustomed to consider the hour or two after lunch on Sunday as the most enjoyable time in the week, for then he gave himself up to the full and uninterrupted pursuit of his hobby. None of his family ever came into his study without invitation, and since he never gave such invitation, he had no fear about being disturbed. Before now he had tried to establish with one or other of them the communication of his joy in his books: he had asked Alice into his sanctuary one Sunday, but when he had shown her an exquisitely tooled binding by Cameron, she had said, 'Oh, what a pretty cover!' A pretty cover ! . . . somehow Alice's appreciation was more hopeless than if she had not admired it at all. Then, opening it, she had come across a slightly compromising picture of Bacchus and Ariadne, and had turned over in such a hurry that she had crumpled the corner of the page. Her father hardly knew whether her maidenly confusion was not worse than the outrage on his adored volume. Stern moralist and Puritan though he was, this sort of prudery seemed to him an affectation that bordered on imbecility. On another occasion he had asked Hugh to look at his books,and Hugh had been much struck by the type of the capital letters in an edition of Omar Khayyam, wondering if it could be enlarged and used in some advertisement of the approaching summer sale at the stores. 'That's the sort of type we want,' he said. 'It hits you in the eye; that does. You can't help reading what is written in it.' Very likely that was quite true, for Hugh had an excellent perception in the matter of attractive type and arrangement in the advertising department, but his father had shut up the bookwith a snap, feeling that it was in the nature of a profanity to let the aroma of business drift into...