First published in 1929 and I read the 1984 reprint published by Hogarth press. It has an introduction by Stephen Pile which adequately sums up the themes within the book, although in my view he could have spent more thought on the central love story of the novel which is lesbian. He talks about "an understandable blushing development". This does fit with the light hearted entertainment provided by the book, but in my view it deserves more analysis as it goes far beyond the idea of "women companions" and represents the only love story in the whole novel.

It is easy to like and be entertained by E F Benson. He provides a series of characters who he caricatures so expertly, that we can still recognise the real Englishness of the people underneath. Paying guests is the story of a season in a boarding house (the Wentworth): it is convenient for people who are taking health cures in the small town of Bolton Spa, but also it has a regular clientele who are almost semi resident. These are people of a certain gentile class who have no real money problems, and fill their days as they wish with the only restrictions being the lunch time and dinner time gongs for meals. The boarders form their own particular social group and are dominated by the blustering Colonel Chase, who spends his days cycling and walking and boasting about his record breaking adventures (he is a slave to his pedometer). Mrs Oxney and Mrs Bertram are two widowed sisters who take pride in running the Wentworth and this season are hosting Mr Kemp and his daughter/nurse Florence, Miss Howard who paints, plays the piano and sings and Mrs Holders who challenges the Colonel during the evening bridge sessions. A Mrs Bliss joins them all and she is passionate about following the guidance of a new craze which she calls Mind: the idea is that all health problems are not real, they are all in the mind.

The novel is built around small incidents that disturb the daily lives of the residents: the loss of Colonel Chase's pedometer, Miss Howards art exhibition, The charity concert in town and Mrs Bliss' zeal in convincing others to follow her example. However beneath the surface there are other issues, the Colonel is thinking about a female companion, Florence Kemp falls in love with Miss Howard and wants to get away from her fathers control. The humour is built around the web of deceit spun by all the characters in pursuit of their own ends. Nobody is spared and E F Benson has tremendous fun exposing all their little peccadillos. The humour is gentle and the plots are well woven into the fabric of the boarding house. As readers we are asked to be amused at this small segment of society and by and large we are. If we can see Benson's characters representing people we have come across, then the novel leans towards being satirical. The love affair between Florence and Miss Howard adds a further dimension, but I wonder should I really be amused by these selfish, reactionary, class conscious bigots. 3.5 stars. ( )

Of the six or seven Benson books I've read, this is my gem, picked up on Deer Island, New Brunswick,
in a run-down but well-roofed used bookstore. I read Paying Guests while a paying guest, not at Bolton Spa, but at Letete, NB. We guests were not in Letete for the summer, nor were our social pretensions
so rigorous. But the amusements of the guest status were legion: our host, of powerful religious
persuasion, had his son and 10 kids show up while we were there--a test worthy the Colonel. Instead of the golf course, we had the drying of sheets in the windy fog. No sun, but they dried.
Instead of the nearby town with the local art exhibit, we had St Andrews and its multiform offers--including other guests houses which we did not consider, though one or two may have been closer to Bolton Spa.
This is a book from which you emerge a changed man. Such an examination of social pretense
and promise, such an account of the milieu of "retirement" in its myriad sense, such a delightful
apparent record--it will never be "taught" in colleges. One understands it without an intermediary.
Yet I find it the equal of the Lucia books, and of its distant cousins by, say, Waugh and Powell. ( )

Those who are familiar with E. F. Benson only through his Lucia and Mapp books may initially find this book disappointing since it is set in a different location both geographically and socially. None of the characters rise to the magnificence of Emmeline Lucas or Miss Mapp and the social circle of the residents of Wentworth is neither as wealthy as that in Riseholme nor as settled in its hierarchical patterns as that of Tilling. This reviewer encourages the reader (whether familiar with Benson or not) to read on. Paying Guests is a wonderful examination of a particular subsection of the English gentry that would be squeezed out of existence by the falling returns on dividends, the dismantling of the British Empire and the next World War. It is also a magnificent picture of the gender dynamics in England between the two World Wars. Finally it is a wonderful exploration of a recurrent theme in Benson in the last half of his writing life--the problem of how one fills up the minutes and hours of one’s life if one has no real interests, no real passions and no real work.

Beyond here there be spoilers.......

On the surface Paying Guests is a series of scenes and incidents from the lives of the owners and lodgers of Wentworth boarding house at Bolton Spa. It is also about the ways in which people “of a certain class" fill their time and elude boredom. Many of the lodgers at Wentworth have come to take the waters in hopes of relieving, if not curing, their bodily ills but that is not the case for all the guests. In fact the two, Miss Howard and Colonel Chase, around whom most of the regular life of the house revolves, are quite healthy.

Colonel Chase is known at Wentworth for what he clearly considers to be prodigiously long bicycle rides and country walks. These activities play an important part in the Colonel passing the hours of the day. He rises, has tea and toast in bed, comes down to breakfast, reads the morning papers, rides his bike, lunches, goes for walk, has tea and plays bridge. He does not make the meals he eats any more than he makes the bed in which he sleeps every night. Colonel Chase spends his time in activities that allow him to avoid empty moments but he contributes nothing to the comfort and ease in which he lives. The (widowed) Mrs. Oxney and her sister (and fellow widow) Mrs. Bertram, hire the staff and do some of the practical work around the house themselves. Colonel Chase spends his time spending his time. He does not work at an income generating job and the reader may wonder if even the things with which he passes his time are enjoyable in and of themselves. He does the crossword puzzle but it seems that he gets more joy out of defeating others at Wentworth in the time it takes to complete it than he does in the actual completion. His extreme anger at losing his walking pedometer and in the failure of his bicycling pedometer suggests that much of the enjoyment he derives from walking and cycling lies in telling others about his records. He enjoys playing bridge but apparently enjoys the chance to instruct and correct those around him more than actually playing the game.

The two things that Colonel Chase does seem to enjoy wholeheartedly are having his comfort and having others arrange for that comfort. Thus his mind turns to the idea of marriage not because of love, monetary need or the desire for companionship but because he hoped for, in the case of one possible Mrs. Chase, an increase in his wealth and prestige and in the case of the other the guaranteed continuation of the comfort and ease to which he had become accustomed.

Miss Howard, unlike Colonel Chase, cannot look forward to a life that would always assure that her physical wants and emotional needs would be the central concern of the people with whom she lived. As the book opens Miss Howard had managed to hold on to her internal girlhood:

" She had been an extremely pretty girl, lively and intelligent and facile, but by some backhanded stroke of fate she had never married, and now at the age of forty, though she had parted with her youth, she had relinquished no atom of her girlishness. She hardly ever walked, but tripped, she warbled little snatches of song when she thought that anyone might be within hearing in order to refresh them with her maidenly brightness, and sat on the hearth-rug in front of the fire, even though there was a far more comfortable seat ready. It was not that she felt any profound passion for tripping, warbling and squatting, but from constantly telling herself that she was barely out of her teens she had got to believe in her girlishness and behaved accordingly."(21)[1]

It is questionable how much longer Miss Howard could continue to be treated like a young woman and how soon she would pass into the sad world of the spinster--the woman who had failed to land herself a husband and the consequent gravitas accorded to the married woman.

Paying Guests is also the story of a very ordinary young woman who, like Miss Howard, was financially secure and unlike Miss Howard seemed never likely to marry. Miss Kemp’s role in life up until the point the reader meets her, was to listen to her father’s stories, to fetch and carry for him and to center every moment of her life around the man’s arthritic and rheumatic aches and pains. Mr. Kemp does not appreciate his daughter efforts to please him. In fact Mr. Kemp does not seem to appreciate anyone’s efforts to make his life comfortable. He has given over the last years of his life to ministering to his every ache, twinge, need and want. He resents that his late wife left half of her fortune to their daughter leaving him only with a life-time interest in the other half of the estate. Up until the the books open the Mrs. Kemps bequest has made no material difference in his life since Miss Kemp has not lived in the London flat left to her by her mother but instead devoted all her time and money to the care of her entirely unappreciative father.

Benson doesn’t take the easy route of presenting the reader with characters who have found themselves in dire and tragic circumstances. Miss Howard is somewhat self-deluding and has found herself trapped by small exaggerations and misleading statements that have led others to presume that she is wealthier and with more aristocratic connections that was the case. Miss Kemp is trapped in a life of boredom and stagnation by filial pressures. Neither is facing ruination although both are facing a long emotionally starved life. Colonel Chase is faced with the problem of insuring that he can live out the rest of his life in the self-centered ease to which he has become accustomed. Mr. Kemp worries that his physical and emotional concerns will always be catered to.

The open chapters of Paying Guests hint that some change is about to happen among these residents of Wentworth and that is indeed what will happen. This is, in its own way, a love story. That the love in question is between two adult women is of no consequence at all to the story, save for the fact that as women past the age of marriage (past their twenties) neither had much hope for any form of marriage except to an older man who was looking for passable looking women with some capital who would look after his house and create a buffer between him and a world that did not cater to his every whim. It is only with another woman that a life of service to a husband, father or other father member could be avoided.

By the end of the book all of the major characters have moved closer to their physical and emotional goals. The route this took may have surprised them just as modern reader may be surprised by the ease and skill with which Benson wrote about what we now tend to think would have been a taboo subject.

In short--a book to read, to reread and to place on the shelf next to the rest of Benson’s best.

Rating: 4-1/2 stars

Benson, E. F. Paying guests. London: Hogarth Press, 1984. ( )

Bolton Spa lacks the inimitable Lucia, but the remarkable Col. Chase (Indian Army, ret'd) makes up for it.

Colonel Chase rules the roost at the Wentworth, the most luxurious guesthouse at Bolton Spa. He is beginning to wonder whether he might be more comfortable with a respectably wealthy, middle-aged wife in his own establishment, or, more accurately, her own establishment. It would be an honour, he thinks, for the giggling, girlish, forty-year-old and apparently, wealthy Miss Alice Howard to support him.

The other paying guests are at Bolton Spa to take the waters. Mr. Kemp, fanatically hypochondriac, travels from spa to spa with his unhappy, lumpish, masculine daughter Florence. Mrs Bliss believes that illness is Error, a failure of Mind, but persists with her program of massage and salt baths for the love of her husband.

With the exception of two clear-sighted characters, the guests at the Wentworth are utterly self-centred and concerned only with giving the impression that they are wealthy and successful. It is this self-delusion, for these characters are so very pleased with themselves, that gives rise to the comedy in this very funny book.

Like the Lucia novels, Paying Guests is set in a world where nothing much happens, and the characters create drama from the trivia of daily life. Lucia’s self regard is complete and her energy enormous; she dominates the social life of her sea-side village. The characters in Paying Guests are sad and feeble in comparison, which somehow makes this book nastier than the Lucia novels. I was quietly amused, rather than screeching with laughter in public places. ( )