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A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain
“We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind.”
So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed , which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria’s reign, while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm—the prime minister once wondered whether she was “the cleverest woman in England or in Europe.” The couple’s six precocious children included E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia novels, and Margaret Benson, the first published female Egyptologist.
What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what went on behind the scenes, which was even more unusual than anyone could imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out novels, essays, and thousands of letters that open stunning new perspectives—including what it might mean for an adult to kiss and propose marriage to a twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a family could support or destroy relationships, or how the death of a child could be celebrated. No other family has left such detailed records about their most intimate moments, and in these remarkable accounts, we see how family life and a family’s understanding of itself took shape during a time when psychoanalysis, scientific and historical challenges to religion, and new ways of thinking about society were developing. This is the story of the Bensons, but it is also more than that—it is the story of how society transitioned from the high Victorian period into modernity.
So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed , which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria’s reign, while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm—the prime minister once wondered whether she was “the cleverest woman in England or in Europe.” The couple’s six precocious children included E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia novels, and Margaret Benson, the first published female Egyptologist.
What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what went on behind the scenes, which was even more unusual than anyone could imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out novels, essays, and thousands of letters that open stunning new perspectives—including what it might mean for an adult to kiss and propose marriage to a twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a family could support or destroy relationships, or how the death of a child could be celebrated. No other family has left such detailed records about their most intimate moments, and in these remarkable accounts, we see how family life and a family’s understanding of itself took shape during a time when psychoanalysis, scientific and historical challenges to religion, and new ways of thinking about society were developing. This is the story of the Bensons, but it is also more than that—it is the story of how society transitioned from the high Victorian period into modernity.
344 pages, Hardcover
Published October 3, 2016
26 people are currently reading
433 people want to read
About the author
Simon Goldhill
62 books21 followersSimon David Goldhil is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011. He is best known for his work on Greek tragedy.
In 2009, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010, he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek.
In 2016, he became a fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and is President of the European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS).
Goldhill is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster and has appeared on television and radio in England, Australia, the United States and Canada. His books have been translated into ten languages, and he has been profiled by newspapers in Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.
In 2009, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010, he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek.
In 2016, he became a fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and is President of the European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS).
Goldhill is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster and has appeared on television and radio in England, Australia, the United States and Canada. His books have been translated into ten languages, and he has been profiled by newspapers in Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.
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February 9, 2020Academicish look at the Benson family of queer Victorian/Edwardian writers, heavy on self-defining and religion. If you're interested in the Bensons it's a useful approach, though really heavy on the fundamentally unbearable, priggish, timid Arthur at the expense of his far more interesting siblings.
February 13, 2017
Goldhill, the specialist in Greek tragedy who's been working on reception studies recently, writes a popularizing biography/analysis of the archbishop of Canterbury under Queen Victoria and his family: his child-bride Minnie (they got engaged when she was 11, married when she turned 18, and yes, it was creepy) who had passionate romantic friendships with women her whole life (possibly involving sex), and who, after the archbishop's death, shared her bed with the previous archbishop's daughter, who'd already been living with her and her husband for years, until her own death; eldest surviving son Arthur, who believed very much in the value of reticence, and insisted that even someone who read his 142-volume diary wouldn't know him at all, who never married but never quite seems to have reached the place of self-knowledge and comfort of a Wilde or Carpenter (whom he knew), teaching at Eton then Cambridge and writing serious-ish novels; middle son Fred, who wrote light novels (including the ones made by the BBC into the Mapp and Lucia series) and spent a lot of time hanging out in Italy where all the gay expats went; and youngest son Hugh, who defied family expectations the most by becoming... a CATHOLIC priest (the first son of the archbishop of Canterbury to do so since the reformation), who of course also wrote novels. Also there were two daughters, they had romantic friends too, but they die and they're girls, no one cares, duh. [I'm being uncharitable: daughter Maggie didn't die right away and actually was the first published female archaeologist in Britain and also brought home her romantic friend to live with her and her mother and her mother's romantic friend the daughter of the previous archbishop of Canterbury, before having a mental breakdown and dying hospitalized; the other daughter caught diphtheria or something equally frightful tending to the poor and died really young.]
Goldhill writes about the family, as he says, not because they are exemplary or typical, but because they were so abnormal ('queer') while being at the center of Victorian power structures (Eton and other elite public schools; Cambridge; and of course, the Anglican church), simultaneously both very respectable and very very weird. The book is divided into three parts: the first, about how their various writings are helping to constitute the genres of biography, autobiography, and "autobiografiction," novels that purport to be fictional characters' autobiographies, like Dickens' David Copperfield; this was a family that couldn't stop writing about itself, once the patriarch had passed away: all of the boys wrote about their parents and themselves, sometimes reworking the stories multiple times (and of course, Arthur's ridiculously lengthy -- yet reticent -- diary). The second part is about their sexuality, spanning as it does the 1850s [the creepy parents' courtship] well into the 20th c. [post WWII even], and how they lived through the Foucauldian birth of homosexuality, without it ever seeming to touch their own sense of identity much?, even as they had passionate and possibly sexual relationships with others of their sex, and knew those who were beginning to use sexuality to define their own identities. The third section is about the role religion played in their lives, not only Hugh's scandalous conversion, but Minnie's extreme religiosity and Arthur's conflicts v. Fred's lack of expressed passion.
And of course, the family was so prolific that their miles of writing surely demand a scholar's attention.
The book is meant to be accessible to non-specialists: there are no numbered foot/end notes and the pricing ($12 for the Kindle edition) is clearly non-academic. However, Goldhill's work is, as always, steeped in critical theory, so I'm not sure the average reader with no academic background in literary theory would really appreciate it (there are other books about the family for that). But I really did enjoy it myself.
My favorite bit, though, came in the epilogue, which I suppose was meant to mimetically show a bit of the genesis of the book itself. A young Goldhill has taken a class out onto the grass at King's College, Cambridge, and a porter hurries over to tell them to move -- unaware, at first, that Goldhill is a faculty member and thus entitled to be there. He apologizes when he sees him, and points up at a window in a nearby building to explain who has complained; it was, he says, 'Dadie' Rylands, whom Goldhill describes to the students as the young man with whom Virginia Woolf had had lunch in "A Room of One's Own." Rylands is elderly by this point but was once incredibly attractive [back in the 20s? When Goldhill first met him?], and was friends with... Arthur Benson; the point being that none of us, even those students who--horribile dictu--were unfamiliar with Woolf's essay, are actually that far removed either from the Bensons or from the Victorians. Not a clean break, but always modernity is where we are.
Goldhill writes about the family, as he says, not because they are exemplary or typical, but because they were so abnormal ('queer') while being at the center of Victorian power structures (Eton and other elite public schools; Cambridge; and of course, the Anglican church), simultaneously both very respectable and very very weird. The book is divided into three parts: the first, about how their various writings are helping to constitute the genres of biography, autobiography, and "autobiografiction," novels that purport to be fictional characters' autobiographies, like Dickens' David Copperfield; this was a family that couldn't stop writing about itself, once the patriarch had passed away: all of the boys wrote about their parents and themselves, sometimes reworking the stories multiple times (and of course, Arthur's ridiculously lengthy -- yet reticent -- diary). The second part is about their sexuality, spanning as it does the 1850s [the creepy parents' courtship] well into the 20th c. [post WWII even], and how they lived through the Foucauldian birth of homosexuality, without it ever seeming to touch their own sense of identity much?, even as they had passionate and possibly sexual relationships with others of their sex, and knew those who were beginning to use sexuality to define their own identities. The third section is about the role religion played in their lives, not only Hugh's scandalous conversion, but Minnie's extreme religiosity and Arthur's conflicts v. Fred's lack of expressed passion.
And of course, the family was so prolific that their miles of writing surely demand a scholar's attention.
The book is meant to be accessible to non-specialists: there are no numbered foot/end notes and the pricing ($12 for the Kindle edition) is clearly non-academic. However, Goldhill's work is, as always, steeped in critical theory, so I'm not sure the average reader with no academic background in literary theory would really appreciate it (there are other books about the family for that). But I really did enjoy it myself.
My favorite bit, though, came in the epilogue, which I suppose was meant to mimetically show a bit of the genesis of the book itself. A young Goldhill has taken a class out onto the grass at King's College, Cambridge, and a porter hurries over to tell them to move -- unaware, at first, that Goldhill is a faculty member and thus entitled to be there. He apologizes when he sees him, and points up at a window in a nearby building to explain who has complained; it was, he says, 'Dadie' Rylands, whom Goldhill describes to the students as the young man with whom Virginia Woolf had had lunch in "A Room of One's Own." Rylands is elderly by this point but was once incredibly attractive [back in the 20s? When Goldhill first met him?], and was friends with... Arthur Benson; the point being that none of us, even those students who--horribile dictu--were unfamiliar with Woolf's essay, are actually that far removed either from the Bensons or from the Victorians. Not a clean break, but always modernity is where we are.
March 25, 2021
A heavy book – better quality paper than usual in paperbacks – but the content too weighs heavily. Note the full title of the book, it does what it says on the cover/tin. From a personal point of view I would have liked a little more on E.F. [Fred] Benson (of Mapp and Lucia fame, but much more besides) He does feature significantly though, along with his brothers Arthur and Hugh. Fred seems the better adjusted of those siblings who survived into their middle years. More at ease with himself and his queerness, perhaps, and less distanced from the 21st century.
The author is a classicist and the book is consciously academic and intellectually posed throughout. He is therefore perhaps well placed to turn his attention on Arthur (A.C.) Benson in particular, a classical scholar and academic and more comfortable in the world of ancient Greece with its comely Greek boys, than in the hard nosed world of Victorian Britain. Arthur was a prolific writer and left behind diaries and personal papers by the ton. Unfortunately (for this reader at least) Arthur was much given to introspection and wrote hesitatingly and at length.
We’d be hard pressed to find a queerer family, particularly in the LGBT sense, but in other ways too. Edward White Benson, future Archbishop of Canterbury, proposed to his wife Minnie when she was 11 or 12 and perched on his knee. EWB was 22/23 at the time. They had 6 children together,none of whom married or left behind any evidence of having physically indulged in heterosexual intercourse. Throughout much of the marriage Minnie had a series of female lovers. One of them, the daughter of a previous Archbishop of Canterbury, lived in the Benson household and shared Minnie’s bed until the latter’s death.
Archbishop Benson dominated his family and its course, and that of its individual members, during his life and long after his death.
Towards the end of the book Goldhill writes, typically:
“The Bensons are a very queer family indeed, then, not because they are sexually, intellectually, socially transgressive – though there are many ways in which they are so, just as there are many ways in which they are as establishment as it is possible to be. Rather they are queer because they embody the sheer difficulty of self-understanding within such overlapping narratives of conversion or change. Queerness is what makes naming, and the understanding which comes with naming, uncertain. (One should always hear the query in queerness). The three boys- Arthur with his constant hesitations, Hugh with his brash certainties but from an aggressively other place, Fred with his studied refusal to engage- are each responding to their father’s and mother’s religiosity, but in so doing also encapsulate something emblematic about the multiple self-positionings that made the transition between the high Victorian world and the first decades of the twentieth century possible and conflicted”.
The author is a classicist and the book is consciously academic and intellectually posed throughout. He is therefore perhaps well placed to turn his attention on Arthur (A.C.) Benson in particular, a classical scholar and academic and more comfortable in the world of ancient Greece with its comely Greek boys, than in the hard nosed world of Victorian Britain. Arthur was a prolific writer and left behind diaries and personal papers by the ton. Unfortunately (for this reader at least) Arthur was much given to introspection and wrote hesitatingly and at length.
We’d be hard pressed to find a queerer family, particularly in the LGBT sense, but in other ways too. Edward White Benson, future Archbishop of Canterbury, proposed to his wife Minnie when she was 11 or 12 and perched on his knee. EWB was 22/23 at the time. They had 6 children together,none of whom married or left behind any evidence of having physically indulged in heterosexual intercourse. Throughout much of the marriage Minnie had a series of female lovers. One of them, the daughter of a previous Archbishop of Canterbury, lived in the Benson household and shared Minnie’s bed until the latter’s death.
Archbishop Benson dominated his family and its course, and that of its individual members, during his life and long after his death.
Towards the end of the book Goldhill writes, typically:
“The Bensons are a very queer family indeed, then, not because they are sexually, intellectually, socially transgressive – though there are many ways in which they are so, just as there are many ways in which they are as establishment as it is possible to be. Rather they are queer because they embody the sheer difficulty of self-understanding within such overlapping narratives of conversion or change. Queerness is what makes naming, and the understanding which comes with naming, uncertain. (One should always hear the query in queerness). The three boys- Arthur with his constant hesitations, Hugh with his brash certainties but from an aggressively other place, Fred with his studied refusal to engage- are each responding to their father’s and mother’s religiosity, but in so doing also encapsulate something emblematic about the multiple self-positionings that made the transition between the high Victorian world and the first decades of the twentieth century possible and conflicted”.
November 23, 2022
I’m not a Bensonhead, as many reviewers here seem to be, so I came to this book without many preconceptions. I found this to be a thought-provoking consideration of the Benson family and their many strange emotional dynamics. Goldhill weaves elegantly between what we might see as being ‘ordinariness’ of the Bensons and what we could see as their ‘queerness’ (in all senses), and of course of the pitfalls of this line of inquiry. How do we understand life stories? What roles do sexuality and religion play within this? This book certainly asks more questions than it answers, but I delight in the aporia.
February 8, 2017
"This book, then, is not a biography but will be about how this family of Graphomanics constantly use their writing to tell and retell The stories of their lives, to one another, and to a broader public." 12
October 12, 2025
I found this book fascinating, I remember it also attracted some very po-faced reviews from areas of the British establishment press who were unimpressed by a 'queer' theorist, an an American one, daring to speak about the Bensons who were? are? such English establishment worthies. But the fact the book is fascinating, readable and provides so much amusement and delight. I would recommend reading the following review:
https://glreview.org/article/the-naug...
particularly if you have no idea who the Bensons were.
https://glreview.org/article/the-naug...
particularly if you have no idea who the Bensons were.
July 24, 2020
This is not a standard biography, but an examination of how one Victorian family navigated through a period of time when queerness was not yet an identity. All of the Bensons were at odds with the culture through their same sex attractions and their religious beliefs. This book examines how they remained at the center of Victorian culture while still grappling with their non-conformity, and how their society’s views on sex and religion changed throughout their lives. Fascinating.
June 17, 2020
An interesting read. Not a biography, but rather an attempt to situate the complex sexualities of members of the family within a 60 year span in which our framing of these shifts.
Mostly interesting, perhaps too Freudian. Struggles with AC Benson because the book was written before the paradigm of asexuality (but not aromantic) was being much talked about.
Usually I like the author inserting themselves into the text, but here it leads to passages where Goldhill seems uncomfortable expressing his line of thought but still expects us to follow it.
Mostly interesting, perhaps too Freudian. Struggles with AC Benson because the book was written before the paradigm of asexuality (but not aromantic) was being much talked about.
Usually I like the author inserting themselves into the text, but here it leads to passages where Goldhill seems uncomfortable expressing his line of thought but still expects us to follow it.
August 3, 2024
escaping the past is a never ending project
queerness is what makes naming, and the understanding that comes with naming, uncertain (one should always hear the query in queerness)
simon, you spent far too much time with arthur benson and not nearly enough with maggie. but simon, simon, you beautiful boy, you sure can spin a yarn
queerness is what makes naming, and the understanding that comes with naming, uncertain (one should always hear the query in queerness)
simon, you spent far too much time with arthur benson and not nearly enough with maggie. but simon, simon, you beautiful boy, you sure can spin a yarn
September 30, 2023
This book is almost a copy-cat of Rodney Bolt‘s biography on Mary Benson from 2011 entitled „As Good as God As Clever as the Devil The Impossible Life of Mary Benson“.
Truly regret I paid so much money for Goödhill ed.
Read Bolt‘s instead and compare content. Even the photos are the same in this ed.:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Truly regret I paid so much money for Goödhill ed.
Read Bolt‘s instead and compare content. Even the photos are the same in this ed.:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
March 21, 2019
I read this because I'm such a huge fan of E.F. Benson. Unfortunately he took a back seat to his brother and parents which rather bummed me out.
July 18, 2021
While I cannot fault the depth of research, the title and description of the book are misleading. Of the 5 Bensons who lived to adulthood and wrote prolific diaries, Goldhill delves almost exclusively into Arthur's.
Goldhill seems to fail to account for the spectrum of sexual identity in his analysis of Arthur:
Goldhill solely focuses on Benson's inability to admit his homosexuality. I propose that Benson exists on the ace spectrum (the "A" in LGBTQIAP+) as either asexual (no sexual attraction to anyone), aromantic (no romantic attraction to anyone) or akoineromantic (sexual attraction that fades once it is reciprocated).
I am keen to learn more about Maggie Benson and Nettie Goulay (pictured on the cover).
Finally, even though the reporting of the lives of the Benson offspring focus mainly on Arthur, the insights into Victorian politics, religion, and zeitgeist is wonderful. I now feel I understand the historical beginnings and crises of the Church of England, Roman Catholicism in England, and the Reformation.
Goldhill seems to fail to account for the spectrum of sexual identity in his analysis of Arthur:
"Arthur Benson is as often baffled by the sexuality of others as he is by his own. His mother, he writes, 'told me several things I didn't know... strange sexual delusions': he was fifty at the time, still being told about such things by his mother... [T]here are many ways he says this over the years - 'I am pleased to recognize that for me the real sexual problem does not exist. I mean that my relations with women and men alike are of a dispassionate kind, without jealousy or desire. I don't want to claim or be claimed. I want nothing but a cordial camaraderie. Yet he is also less than pleased to recognize that he longs for something more, an imagined world where he was not brought up to believe that there was something sinful, something inherently wrong with sex itself. He is repeatedly distressed by his own failure to discover passion or lasting strength of feeling. He expresses pain that he compulsively withdraws when a relationship approached intimacy. He knows in this that he is different from others - 'I don't think I am an entirely conventional person' - but struggles to define his own oddity except by a constant process of an anxious search for the filigree of difference between himself and others...
He can express in multiple ways what he is not, and who is is not like, but finds it excruciatingly hard to find a positive self-definition. His (ab)normality is always a fleeting object of anxious search... [W]e have an extraordinarily detailed and highly articulate case of how a man who finds male desirable struggles for self-expression in an era before the pathology of (homo)sexuality has become a social or emotional expectation.
It is hard to name Arthur Benson's queerness, then, because although he cannot stop talking about it, he can never quite find the words for himself. (147-149)
Goldhill solely focuses on Benson's inability to admit his homosexuality. I propose that Benson exists on the ace spectrum (the "A" in LGBTQIAP+) as either asexual (no sexual attraction to anyone), aromantic (no romantic attraction to anyone) or akoineromantic (sexual attraction that fades once it is reciprocated).
I am keen to learn more about Maggie Benson and Nettie Goulay (pictured on the cover).
Finally, even though the reporting of the lives of the Benson offspring focus mainly on Arthur, the insights into Victorian politics, religion, and zeitgeist is wonderful. I now feel I understand the historical beginnings and crises of the Church of England, Roman Catholicism in England, and the Reformation.
July 29, 2020
A relatively academic book about the Benson family of queer Victorian/Edwardian writers and journalers, especially interested in self-definition through the written word, religion, and Victorian sexuality.
I knew nothing about the Bensons and still got a lot out of this book. It's an amazing portrait of a family who left boatloads of written material at a really important historical turning point - during the creation of "homosexuality" as an identifier, right before WW1, the changes etc. If you have an interest in any of these things, this might be your jam.
My single critique is that the author spends all this time on the sons, the father, and the mother, and very little time on the two sisters, who sound extremely interesting. Where's their book?
I knew nothing about the Bensons and still got a lot out of this book. It's an amazing portrait of a family who left boatloads of written material at a really important historical turning point - during the creation of "homosexuality" as an identifier, right before WW1, the changes etc. If you have an interest in any of these things, this might be your jam.
My single critique is that the author spends all this time on the sons, the father, and the mother, and very little time on the two sisters, who sound extremely interesting. Where's their book?
February 8, 2020
Possibly would have liked a bit more about Fred (EF) Benson - though maybe that was reflecting Goldhill's sense of his evasive detachment?
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