Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mrs. Ames

Mrs. Ames

Benson, E. F.

Hardcover

Classic FictionGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 3368901710
ISBN13: 9783368901714
Publisher: Outlook Verlag
Published: May 9 2023
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

E. F. Benson's subject is always the petty concerns of petty people, but his talent is to make those concerns nearly as important to us as they are to his characters. For us, what happens to Benson's people is also much funnier than it is to them.

As with the Mapp and Lucia books Benson began to write in the 1920s, Mrs. Ames (1912) deals with the struggle of two women to be the dominant social maven in their little town. Millie Evans and Amy Ames are cousins and rivals for the title of supreme hostess of Riseborough, and an additional frisson is added to the plot by the dalliance of Millie and Major Ames, Amy's husband. Mrs. Ames dares to invite only one member of each prominent Riseborough couple to a dinner party. Mrs. Evans counters with a fancy dress ball with a Shakespearean theme, and Benson makes hilarious use of the ball's glut of Cleopatras and paucity of Antonys. Then Mrs. Ames begins to read suffragette tracts, and as Benson writes, the fumes of an idea, to one who had practically never tasted one, intoxicated her as new wine mounts to the head of a teetotaler. (Michael Cohen)

7 different editions

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