The Relentless City

The Relentless City is one of the first novels of E.F. Benson. Published in 1903, between the first success of the Dodo and the famous Mapp and Lucia series, it can be considered a link between the two. The story is set around two English people, Lord Keynes and a young widow Sybil. They decide to resolve their financial issues by marrying wealthy in America. In this novel Benson keeps his style as a witty social critic, but this time for a change, American society is a target._x000D_ Edward Frederic Benson (1867 – 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. He started his novel writing career in 1893 with the fashionably controversial Dodo, which was an instant success, and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama. He repeated the success of Dodo, with sequels to this novel, but the greatest success came relatively late in his career with The Mapp and Lucia series consisting of six novels and two short stories. The novels feature humorous incidents in the lives of (mainly) upper-middle-class British people in the 1920s and 1930s, vying for social prestige and one-upmanship in an atmosphere of extreme cultural snobbery. Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric, oblique, and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories.