Friendship

Miss Benson’s Beetle is essentially a story about the friendship between Margery Benson and Enid Pretty. The two women manage to overcome their differences and become best friends. Both the women are incredibly loyal to each other and value their friendship above all else.

At the start of the novel, Margery has no friends. She spent her adolescence catching beetles all alone, and her young adulthood chasing after Professor Smith. Margery’s timidity and trauma force her to retreat into herself. She also has many prejudices, as a result of her conservative upbringing. This makes her judge Enid when they first meet off of small, irrelevant differences between them. In getting to know Enid, Margery realizes that she has wasted a lot of time being lonely. She grows to love the wild and cheery woman like a sister.

Enid is someone who gets along with...