In the last two decades of the twentieth century, it seems certain that more people on both sides of the Atlantic have seen E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson's best-known characters, Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp, than have read about them. In 1984-1985 Benson's Mapp and Lucia (1931) was adapted for British television's Channel 4 by Gerald Savory. The reading and viewing experiences do not coincide. Benson's miniaturist talent for delineating character, with much less attention to plot and action, does not translate well to a medium where "talking heads" are best avoided. His masterly use of conversation, often expertly contradicted by the same characters' simultaneous interior monologues, largely vanishes on screen. To replace it tends to produce frenetic activity verging on slapstick, something to which Benson seldom stoops. Even faithful dramatic adaptation of such a small part of Benson's work hardly makes it more than superficially available, and scholarly interest in his oeuvre has only recently begun to appear.
