Theodora Benson

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TB published over a thirty-year span in the earlier twentieth century. Most immediately successful among her works in terms of sales were books of the currently fashionable flippant humour, most of them in collaboration with Betty Askwith . TB 's novels, of which the earlier ones were very highly praised, present a cynical world of failed romance, lost ideals, social foibles, and ruthless self-seeking. Some are experimental in form. She also wrote short fiction which draws on a range of settings and periods, and presents an even bleaker world than her novels, in which compassion for the subjects is implied though not directly expressed: best-known of these are her thrillers and stories of the macabre. To her prose fiction both long and short she added travel books, an edited collection, and during the Second World War (when she worked as a ghostwriter on official speeches) an information book.

Milestones

21 August 1906

Eleanor Theodora Roby Benson (who later wrote as TB ) was born in Staffordshire, the youngest but one in a family of four, whose youngest died in an accident at eight.
“Obituary: Hon. Theodora Benson”. Times, No. 57444, p. 8.
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Benson, Theodora. “The First Time I Met the Team”. The First Time I . . ., edited by Theodora Benson, Chapman and Hall, pp. 283-06.
289

1928

TB published her first novel, Salad Days, with a dedication to her friend and future collaborator Betty Askwith . The title-page quotes Shakespeare 's Cleopatra.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

Christmas Day 1968

TB died, aged sixty-two, of pneumonia while staying in the country with her sister Antonia, Lady Radcliffe .
“Obituary: Hon. Theodora Benson”. Times, No. 57444, p. 8.
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Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
139

Biography

TB bore this style from the time that her father became a baron.

Birth and Family