Edward Frederic Benson OBE (24 July 1867 – 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and short story writer.

[citation needed] Benson was educated at Temple Grove School, then at Marlborough College, where he wrote some of his earliest works and upon which he based his novel David Blaize.

His 1906 short story "The Bus-Conductor", a fatal-crash premonition tale about a person haunted by a hearse driver, has been adapted several times.

[Note 2] Benson's story David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918) is a children's fantasy influenced by the work of Lewis Carroll.

[5] "Mr Tilly's Seance" is a witty and amusing story about a man flattened by a traction engine who finds himself dead and conscious on the 'other side'.

The principal setting of four of the Mapp and Lucia books is a town named Tilling, which is recognizably based on Rye, East Sussex, where Benson lived from 1918 and served as mayor from 1934.

[8] At Cambridge, he fell in love with several fellow students, including Vincent Yorke (father of the novelist Henry Green), about whom he confided to his diary, "I feel perfectly mad about him just now... Ah, if only he knew, and yet I think he does.