MISS MAPP

Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older....Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

This is the second or third book in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, depending on how you figure (second published, but the omnibus edition of the series I got from the library had it third, which makes some sense because it’s about a completely different character and town). Like the two Lucia books, it centers around the social machinations of a strong-willed woman and her friends (or frenemies) in a quirky small town, but the similarities end there. While Lucia is grandiose—egotistical, snobbish, “artistic”—Miss Mapp is petty, a nosy, conniving, parsimonious spinster (I hate to use the word, but she lives up to the stereotype), and her battles for social supremacy center around small matters of bridge parties, dressmaking, red-currant fool, and the drinking habits of elderly bachelors. Like Lucia, she disarms frequent but (usually ineffectual) challenges to her position (mostly from her hilarious rival Godiva “Diva” Plaistow) with relative ease, but she takes a more obvious, sometimes downright mean, pleasure in thwarting her enemies. This sounds unpleasant, but never fear; she is thoroughly as delightful to read about as Lucia, sometimes even more so. Like the townspeople of Tilling, who chafe under her dictatorship but ultimately accept their defeats with resigned good humor, I grew to love Miss Mapp and her antics, because no matter how maddening, they definitely make life more interesting.