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Queen Lucia — LibriVox Audiobook

An audiobook edition of Queen Lucia. Queen Lucia is a 1920 comic novel written by E. F. Benson. It is the first of six novels in the popular Mapp and Lucia series, about idle women in the 1920s and their struggle for social dominance over their small communities. This book introduces Emmeline Lucas, known as Lucia to her friends, the social queen of the fictional Elizabethan village of Riseholme, as well as her husband Philip ("Peppino") Lucas, her best friend Georgie Pillson and her friendly rival, Daisy Quantock. The book was a success for Benson, his greatest since writing Dodo in 1893. Benson biographer Brian Masters writes, "The Athenaeum cleverly pointed out that Mr. Benson's humour had gone, not to the dogs, but to the cats." Geoffrey Palmer and Lloyd Noel write, "With Queen Lucia, Fred [Benson] successfully entered into a new realm of social satire mixed with comedy and tinged with farce... With penetrating ruthlessness, he speared his characters' pretensions and held them up for ridicule, though he always tempered his attack with affectionate understanding."

Description adapted from Wikipedia contributors, Queen Lucia · CC BY-SA 4.0. Text adapted for this entry.

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Emmeline Lucas is the social queen of Riseholme, presiding over her community and directing their interests in art and culture. A pretentious show-off, La Lucia drops random Italian phrases into her speech, gives concerts to her friends of the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, dabbles in art, and plants Shakespeare-themed flower arrangements in her garden. Her neighbour, devoted faddist Daisy Quantock, has given up her uric-acid-free diet and Christian Science to focus on Indian mysticism, thanks to a mysterious guru who shows up at her door and offers to show her the Way. Lucia must decide how to annex the guru, and turn this into a social success for herself. Daisy then brings in a Russian medium, Princess Popoffski. Lucia has a harder time when opera diva Olga Bracely arrives in Riseholme for a visit, luring away Lucia's devoted friend Georgie Pillson.
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Source and revision history ↗ · Underlying book identified by the catalog’s explicit book_slug relation. Exact source annotation 731. Adapted from Wikipedia contributors, Queen Lucia. Section headings and formatting adjusted. · Content license