As good as God, as clever as the devil

the long version

"Minnie Sidgwick was just twelve years old when her cousin, twenty-three-year-old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853. Edward went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie - as Mary Benson - to preside over Lambeth Palace. When [he] died [in 1896], Mary set up house in a Jacobean manor house with her friend Lucy Tait. She remained at the heart of her family of fiercely eccentric children; Arthur wrote the words for Land of Hope and Glory [music by Edward Elgar]; Fred became a successful author (his Mapp and Lucia novels still have a cult following); and Maggie a renowned Egyptologist. But none of the them was 'the marrying sort' and such a rackety family seemed destined for disruption. Drawing on the diaries and novels of thye Bensons themselves ... Bolt has created a ... family history of Victorian and Edwardian England."--Back cover.