Paying Guests (Summarized Edition)

Paying Guests is E. F. Benson's brisk, observant portrait of a genteel boarding house in interwar England, where fragile hierarchies are tested at the dinner gong. With supple free indirect narration and set pieces that slip from decorum into farce, Benson choreographs rivalries over precedence, musical evenings, and charitable committees into a comedy of exposure. The paying guest—neither servant...