Theodora Benson

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.