What do you think?
Rate this book
The Inheritor
Book by Benson, E. F.
316 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
1 person is currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
E.F. Benson
1,027 books351 followersEdward Frederic "E. F." Benson was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer.
E. F. Benson was the younger brother of A.C. Benson, who wrote the words to "Land of Hope and Glory", Robert Hugh Benson, author of several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson, an author and amateur Egyptologist.
Benson died during 1940 of throat cancer at the University College Hospital, London. He is buried in the cemetery at Rye, East Sussex.
Last paragraph from Wikipedia
E. F. Benson was the younger brother of A.C. Benson, who wrote the words to "Land of Hope and Glory", Robert Hugh Benson, author of several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson, an author and amateur Egyptologist.
Benson died during 1940 of throat cancer at the University College Hospital, London. He is buried in the cemetery at Rye, East Sussex.
Last paragraph from Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Read
September 4, 2020A deeply odd EF Benson novel, falling somewhere between the arch Englishness of the Mapp & Lucia material for which he's best known, and the supernatural stories for which others rate him – but rather than making it appeal to both constituencies, that seems instead to have left it twice-forgotten (this is a 1990 reprint of the 1930 original, and I'm now not even quite sure where I first heard of it myself, though Kevin Jackson seems a likely culprit). At the same time, it's clearly kin to various other early 20th century material which is remembered; you could consider it a midpoint between Saki and Arthur Machen (though Saki wasn't averse to his own occasional hints at the Great God Pan), or a nod to Forster's line about giving up the glory of the animal for a tailcoat and a set of ideas. Hell, it's not far at all from Benson's own Lovecraft-endorsed The Man Who Went Too Far, though it plays out at much greater length (too much so, in truth – part of the trouble with a book reaching after a mystical understanding which defies words is that the series of faltering attempts can easily become repetitive).
The Inheritor moves through a number of distinct locations, most of them ones I know a little – indeed, a Benson fan club address in the foreword is just around the corner from my previous London address. The story proper, though, begins in Cambridge, and recalls the Style Council's video for Long Hot Summer, though nowhere near so ruggedly heterosexual. If one squints at the dates a little, protagonist Steven Gervase might even have been at King's at the same time Withnail's Uncle Monty was committing his sensitive crimes in a punt with a chap called Norman. No Norman for Gervase, though; he's in the process of dropping his previously inseparable chum, "large elementary youth" Charles Merriman, known always and despite his size as the Child, in favour of young don Maurice Crofts. There's plenty of the usual guff about a sexless comradeship, being a "confirmed celibate", and a higher, less complicated love than that of man for woman, none of which will do the least to throw the modern reader off the scent, even without all those 'did this mean the same thing then? Well it's funny either way' lines about "fragments of gay conversation" and "stroking the victorious crew". As for "I shan't bother to burst myself if you're not bursting yourself behind me", well. But what stands out is that despite opening on undergrad larks, despite the camp conversations in which not a single utterance is sincere, Cambridge is mostly discussed as a place of dessication, rather than a fairytale fuckin' city. There is a scene of nocturnal magic which captures summer nights there as well as anything I've ever read, but it's an anomaly and an ending, rather than the default state of the place, which is seen as a place where dusty old men are made.
More magical by far is Steven's ancestral home in a remote part of Cornwall (if that's not tautologous). Again, this brings out some gorgeous prose from Benson: "Dappled and checkered lay the slopes, and silent but for the drowsy hiss of the ripples on the edges of the sea." There are hints of darkness, too, for at the core of the story are those legacies to which Steven is the eponymous heir. His shipping magnate uncle's fortune, yes, but also a curse in the direct line, whereby the firstborn son is never quite human, always some manner of faun or satyr*. The village of Trenair has no church, nor chapel, but this is discussed in gentle terms of being 'old-fashioned', a funny story about what happened when the Wesleyans came – a pagan village conspiracy, yes, but one which confines itself to larks; folk horror without the horror, because while there is a curse, surely Steven's beauty proves it's ended? Except, of course, that horns and hooves aren't the only ways in which one can be other than human. With all its talk of Steven as lacking some crucial human quality, his attempts to take refuge in marriage and learn normal human feelings, the easy modern interpretation of the novel would of course** be to read all that magic and mystery as a metaphor for queerness. Truer, though, to steal that lovely line from Lucifer and say that it is the thing for which queerness is a metaphor – and truer yet to say that the two are images of each other, writhing together like serpents, at once fascinating and horrific. Underlying it all is an ambiguous fascination with the idea of humanity as becoming something "finer and more sensitive" once the integument of learning and civilisation is sloughed off, a notion embodied in another of Steven's favourites, Tim, an illegitimate relation who is pretty much his double, yet at once the village idiot and even more attuned to the unseen mysteries. It is when Tim dances for Steven that he comes closest to apprehending it all: "They were bringing out the secret things; the clues were floating like gossamer in the air, and my fingers were on them." But of course, neither Steven nor Benson can ever quite say what it is that they're grasping at. There's something fascinating in such a rarefied author, the gay son of an archbishop no less, and his effete characters, dreaming of an end to civilisation, so diametrically opposed in some respects (but equally as ridiculous as) the macho, Mad Max stylings of much modern neo-primitivist longing.
Elsewhere, there are sections which have aged very strangely, and I don't just mean in terms of the class and sexual politics, though those too. For instance, the notion in amongst all the definitely-not-gay stuff, all those protestations of it lacking the jealousy and restrictions of heterosexual marriage, that "friendships of this sort were by their very nature duets, not trios" – something which, historically speaking, queer men were often the first to realise need not be the case. More unsettling is the notion of Trenair looking and feeling like spring in midwinter. Here it's a sign of an enchanted pagan place, whereas in our own time it's only down to an impending and wholly un-magical doom owing far more to the likes of Steven's philistine uncle, who "hardly ever enjoyed himself, apart from his keen appreciation of his own importance, but that, after all, made life extremely well worth living". Hell, there's even a passage where Steven says "you might as well set out to destroy seas and springs" as the old gods. Well, where missionaries failed, I think industrialists have done a pretty good job of it, more's the pity. More prescient, though, is that Steven's goal is mentioned several times as 'realization of himself' (yes, with the US spelling), long before 'self-realisation' had overtaken duty and such as a key 20th century motive. And anticipating our own dreary, interminable moment, there's the awareness that "Even if you want to do a thing, it becomes a task if you're told you're expected to" – a fine summary of why quiet walks, spending time with my spouse, and streaming films have been far less satisfactory this year than they were in times when they were freely chosen activities. Beneath all of that, though, and wrapped around as it is with a very particular set of contexts and markers, this remains both a beautiful and an insightful, if necessarily unsuccessful, attempt at an essentially impossible task: describing the feeling of magic, and not even the ritual but the natural sort.
*I never wholly understood the firm distinction myself, having always thought it would make more sense if fauns were the juvenile form, or else for it to be simply a cultural divide, like Oasis/Blur or Beatles/Stones. Except without one being so obviously and entirely better than the other.
**The book has a whole recurring riff on 'of course', which makes me feel like a right arsehole for using it, yet somehow the imposture of editing it out would be worse.
The Inheritor moves through a number of distinct locations, most of them ones I know a little – indeed, a Benson fan club address in the foreword is just around the corner from my previous London address. The story proper, though, begins in Cambridge, and recalls the Style Council's video for Long Hot Summer, though nowhere near so ruggedly heterosexual. If one squints at the dates a little, protagonist Steven Gervase might even have been at King's at the same time Withnail's Uncle Monty was committing his sensitive crimes in a punt with a chap called Norman. No Norman for Gervase, though; he's in the process of dropping his previously inseparable chum, "large elementary youth" Charles Merriman, known always and despite his size as the Child, in favour of young don Maurice Crofts. There's plenty of the usual guff about a sexless comradeship, being a "confirmed celibate", and a higher, less complicated love than that of man for woman, none of which will do the least to throw the modern reader off the scent, even without all those 'did this mean the same thing then? Well it's funny either way' lines about "fragments of gay conversation" and "stroking the victorious crew". As for "I shan't bother to burst myself if you're not bursting yourself behind me", well. But what stands out is that despite opening on undergrad larks, despite the camp conversations in which not a single utterance is sincere, Cambridge is mostly discussed as a place of dessication, rather than a fairytale fuckin' city. There is a scene of nocturnal magic which captures summer nights there as well as anything I've ever read, but it's an anomaly and an ending, rather than the default state of the place, which is seen as a place where dusty old men are made.
More magical by far is Steven's ancestral home in a remote part of Cornwall (if that's not tautologous). Again, this brings out some gorgeous prose from Benson: "Dappled and checkered lay the slopes, and silent but for the drowsy hiss of the ripples on the edges of the sea." There are hints of darkness, too, for at the core of the story are those legacies to which Steven is the eponymous heir. His shipping magnate uncle's fortune, yes, but also a curse in the direct line, whereby the firstborn son is never quite human, always some manner of faun or satyr*. The village of Trenair has no church, nor chapel, but this is discussed in gentle terms of being 'old-fashioned', a funny story about what happened when the Wesleyans came – a pagan village conspiracy, yes, but one which confines itself to larks; folk horror without the horror, because while there is a curse, surely Steven's beauty proves it's ended? Except, of course, that horns and hooves aren't the only ways in which one can be other than human. With all its talk of Steven as lacking some crucial human quality, his attempts to take refuge in marriage and learn normal human feelings, the easy modern interpretation of the novel would of course** be to read all that magic and mystery as a metaphor for queerness. Truer, though, to steal that lovely line from Lucifer and say that it is the thing for which queerness is a metaphor – and truer yet to say that the two are images of each other, writhing together like serpents, at once fascinating and horrific. Underlying it all is an ambiguous fascination with the idea of humanity as becoming something "finer and more sensitive" once the integument of learning and civilisation is sloughed off, a notion embodied in another of Steven's favourites, Tim, an illegitimate relation who is pretty much his double, yet at once the village idiot and even more attuned to the unseen mysteries. It is when Tim dances for Steven that he comes closest to apprehending it all: "They were bringing out the secret things; the clues were floating like gossamer in the air, and my fingers were on them." But of course, neither Steven nor Benson can ever quite say what it is that they're grasping at. There's something fascinating in such a rarefied author, the gay son of an archbishop no less, and his effete characters, dreaming of an end to civilisation, so diametrically opposed in some respects (but equally as ridiculous as) the macho, Mad Max stylings of much modern neo-primitivist longing.
Elsewhere, there are sections which have aged very strangely, and I don't just mean in terms of the class and sexual politics, though those too. For instance, the notion in amongst all the definitely-not-gay stuff, all those protestations of it lacking the jealousy and restrictions of heterosexual marriage, that "friendships of this sort were by their very nature duets, not trios" – something which, historically speaking, queer men were often the first to realise need not be the case. More unsettling is the notion of Trenair looking and feeling like spring in midwinter. Here it's a sign of an enchanted pagan place, whereas in our own time it's only down to an impending and wholly un-magical doom owing far more to the likes of Steven's philistine uncle, who "hardly ever enjoyed himself, apart from his keen appreciation of his own importance, but that, after all, made life extremely well worth living". Hell, there's even a passage where Steven says "you might as well set out to destroy seas and springs" as the old gods. Well, where missionaries failed, I think industrialists have done a pretty good job of it, more's the pity. More prescient, though, is that Steven's goal is mentioned several times as 'realization of himself' (yes, with the US spelling), long before 'self-realisation' had overtaken duty and such as a key 20th century motive. And anticipating our own dreary, interminable moment, there's the awareness that "Even if you want to do a thing, it becomes a task if you're told you're expected to" – a fine summary of why quiet walks, spending time with my spouse, and streaming films have been far less satisfactory this year than they were in times when they were freely chosen activities. Beneath all of that, though, and wrapped around as it is with a very particular set of contexts and markers, this remains both a beautiful and an insightful, if necessarily unsuccessful, attempt at an essentially impossible task: describing the feeling of magic, and not even the ritual but the natural sort.
*I never wholly understood the firm distinction myself, having always thought it would make more sense if fauns were the juvenile form, or else for it to be simply a cultural divide, like Oasis/Blur or Beatles/Stones. Except without one being so obviously and entirely better than the other.
**The book has a whole recurring riff on 'of course', which makes me feel like a right arsehole for using it, yet somehow the imposture of editing it out would be worse.
January 9, 2025
Okay I absolutely loved this. The Inheritor starts out in Cambridge and slowly devolves into a claustrophobic, otherworldly novel. And there are layers and layers of queer imagery and queer subtext at play.
We follow Steven Crofts as his relationships come under intense strain as he falls deeper and deeper into the family curse. The only relationship that persists is Steven's relationship with Tim, a Pan-like illegitimate relation who is nearly identical in appearance to Steven.
The references to paganism, interestingly, seem to be a representation for both heterosexuality and homosexuality in this novel. Maurice and Steven losing themselves and social confines to follow their nature feels pretty obvious as far as symbolism goes. Steven goes as far as recognising something in Maurice's nature and they're quoting Walt Whitman together. But when Steven rejects Maurice and loses his humanity altogether and perpetuates the family curse (involving a wife and a first born), the paganism has now shifted to represent the unnaturalness of a heterosexual relationship/heterosexual coupling.
The abundant themes and references to paganism and Greek culture aside, Steven and Maurice form a passionate friendship that is so overtly romantic that a few sentences needed to be dedicated for Benson to assure the reader that their relationship was sexless. If you took these statements at face value, you probably wouldn't read into the fact that Steven was disappointed when his wife loses her boyish appearance when she's pregnant and he's repulsed by her touch. Even though he has had very physical relationships with his male close friends. The homoeroticism between Steven/The Child, Steven/Maurice, and even Steven/Tim is fairly obvious. (Even if Steven and Tim are related, what Tim represents to Maurice is exactly what Maurice was to The Child.)
This novel feels like it shouldn't work. And in any other hands, I don't think it would. It's so character-driven and sustains itself on the atmosphere it creates. But I could have read another 100 pages of this - I'd love to see how the events following the ending would continue to play out. And after finishing the novel, I can't quite tell how much was a decent into madness, if Steven truly was missing a soul and his humanity, and how much of the ancient magic was real.
We follow Steven Crofts as his relationships come under intense strain as he falls deeper and deeper into the family curse. The only relationship that persists is Steven's relationship with Tim, a Pan-like illegitimate relation who is nearly identical in appearance to Steven.
The references to paganism, interestingly, seem to be a representation for both heterosexuality and homosexuality in this novel. Maurice and Steven losing themselves and social confines to follow their nature feels pretty obvious as far as symbolism goes. Steven goes as far as recognising something in Maurice's nature and they're quoting Walt Whitman together. But when Steven rejects Maurice and loses his humanity altogether and perpetuates the family curse (involving a wife and a first born), the paganism has now shifted to represent the unnaturalness of a heterosexual relationship/heterosexual coupling.
The abundant themes and references to paganism and Greek culture aside, Steven and Maurice form a passionate friendship that is so overtly romantic that a few sentences needed to be dedicated for Benson to assure the reader that their relationship was sexless. If you took these statements at face value, you probably wouldn't read into the fact that Steven was disappointed when his wife loses her boyish appearance when she's pregnant and he's repulsed by her touch. Even though he has had very physical relationships with his male close friends. The homoeroticism between Steven/The Child, Steven/Maurice, and even Steven/Tim is fairly obvious. (Even if Steven and Tim are related, what Tim represents to Maurice is exactly what Maurice was to The Child.)
This novel feels like it shouldn't work. And in any other hands, I don't think it would. It's so character-driven and sustains itself on the atmosphere it creates. But I could have read another 100 pages of this - I'd love to see how the events following the ending would continue to play out. And after finishing the novel, I can't quite tell how much was a decent into madness, if Steven truly was missing a soul and his humanity, and how much of the ancient magic was real.
August 3, 2020
The story in itself, if stripped of the author's gift of knowing how to tell it, would be a little ludicrous. Benson's writing, however, not only manages to make it sound convincing, but makes you feel truly transported in the world it conjures up. With an original and unpredictable plot line, this is a marvellous book, filled to the brim with queer symbolism and lyricism.
April 13, 2009
What an unusual book. Subtle and surprising. Starts off like Brideshead Revisited and ends up like Rosemary's Baby. Surprising insight into personality. Both of it's time and ahead of it if that's possible. Intriguing and like nothing I've ever read. Can see why it's obscure b/c it's really odd!
May 15, 2024
This is such a strange novel, I hardly know what to say about it. A still young but constitutionally reserved Cambridge don falls into passionate friendship with a twenty year blond Adonis of an undergraduate, Steven Gervase. There is a long-standing curse on the eldest son of the Gervase clan, condemning them to be born as creatures of varying but goatlike monstrosity. Steven is unaffected physically, but beneath his beauty, lacks all human feeling. Strange forces are massing in the woods beneath his Cornish family home. Attempting to vanquish the curse, Steven marries although incapable of love, and fathers a child; the final chapters while the reader waits to see whether the prophecy will come true strongly prefigure Rosemary’s Baby.
The relationship between Steven and the stuffy but adoring academic, Maurice Crofts, reminded me of the writers’ reported touchstone in characterizing Joey and Chandler’s friendship in the early seasons of Friends: ‘Write it gay, play it straight.’ It is amazing in a book from 1930, the depth of feeling Benson permits himself to explore in Maurice’s devotion to Steven, at least once he has got himself off the hook of self-revelation by repeatedly emphasizing its sexlessness.
Paganism, and the horned and hoofed symbols of it lurking in the woods, were popular with certain writers of fantasy in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras (Benson was born in 1867), and it felt to me as though forces were coming out of these woods – the unconscious? – and guiding Benson’s hand. I wasn’t always sure he was fully in control of what he was writing, and that for me made The Inheritor a fascinating read.
The relationship between Steven and the stuffy but adoring academic, Maurice Crofts, reminded me of the writers’ reported touchstone in characterizing Joey and Chandler’s friendship in the early seasons of Friends: ‘Write it gay, play it straight.’ It is amazing in a book from 1930, the depth of feeling Benson permits himself to explore in Maurice’s devotion to Steven, at least once he has got himself off the hook of self-revelation by repeatedly emphasizing its sexlessness.
Paganism, and the horned and hoofed symbols of it lurking in the woods, were popular with certain writers of fantasy in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras (Benson was born in 1867), and it felt to me as though forces were coming out of these woods – the unconscious? – and guiding Benson’s hand. I wasn’t always sure he was fully in control of what he was writing, and that for me made The Inheritor a fascinating read.
October 24, 2021
This was the 20th book I've read by Mr. Benson! Evidently I'm a fan.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews