The Mapp of 1922

Abstract

1922 is typically read as the defining year of literary modernism: the year of The Waste Land, Ulysses, and Jacob’s Room. But what else was published that year? And how can we understand the field of literary production in 1922 as extending beyond those canonical modernist monuments? With the publication of Miss Mapp in 1922 the English novelist E.F. Benson found the means to extend the comic scene he had originated with Queen Lucia in 1920. The ferociously petty Elizabeth Mapp is a worthy antagonist for the expansive noblesse of Lucia as, over twenty years and six novels, they battle for social precedence. Benson’s career as a middlebrow writer resists the values and period markers by which 20^th century writing has often been defined. To that end his work is sidelined as trivial, as the comic “trimmings” rather than the “wide prospect.” Re-situating Benson and Miss Mapp in ‘the’ (or ‘a’) map of 1922 allows us to think more eccentrically about that year as well as about the diverse literary environment of the first half of the twentieth century.