[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by issybird

In another thread, Tom said he thought Lucia would make a good sitcom. I mentioned the two mini-series I know of, but then I realized it was a sitcom, set 70 years later and transformed from the upper middle class to the middle class.

Spoiler:

I know there are differences, but it seems to me the pretentious snobbery, innate poor taste and lack of self-awareness are the same.

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Keeping Up Appearances was definitely in my mind when I read this. I enjoyed this in nearly the same way but if I had tried to read this one on my Kindle I doubt I would have made it past chapter 1....

...I wish Peppino had been more sympathetic; he doesn't get too involved with the nonsense but he doesn't exactly distance himself either and he would have been a good foil, ala Richard Bucket, "pronounced 'Bouquet'".

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Here's my entire review at goodreads. Like many of you, the parallels to Keeping Up Appearances was obvious.

I wrote about the similarities to Keeping Up Appearances in my Goodreads review of Queen Lucia from January:

...The creator of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet, of course) had to have been a fan of Lucia. Hyacinth is like a middle-class and even more ridiculous version of her.

Of course, I have a tendency to relate things to each other often and sometimes in unusual ways, so I can never be sure if it's something everyone would notice and agree with, or something only I do. With this I think we can safely say that with so many of us seeing it, the creator of Keeping Up Appearances had to have been a fan of Benson.

Originally Posted by issybird

One thing that struck me is that while the story is of its time, it's not in its time. For a book published in 1920 it's remarkable in a way that the society portrayed shows no aftereffects of the Great War, which had just ended. Well, people sought escape in comic novels; that's understandable; you see the same phenomenon in Wodehouse. But much of the action, especially Daisy's various crank interests, reflected how people sought to cope with the grim post-war reality. This would include her interest in Christian Science and her guru, but most notably her involvement in Spiritualism, which had a huge bump in interest immediately after the war, as people sought to contact their dead. But lacking the grief and desperation that fed the movement in the outside world, the Riseholmites could abandon it easily and move on to the next stunt.

I finished the second book, Miss Mapp, recently and I think Queen Lucia is definitely more 'fantasy' in that everyone is so carefree and there is an optimistic and upbeat feel to it all. Miss Mapp still has this somewhat, but I think it's more 'realistic' in that you do see more of the aftereffects and worries in people's attitudes and somehow the second book seems just slightly more sombre. Perhaps a few extra years of 'calming down' from the war let Benson add back in a touch more realism in that regard, though since I'm only two books in I don't know what 'tone' the remaining ones have.