Outside the Door

Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 - 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, known professionally as E. F. Benson.
Benson's first book was Sketches from Marlborough. He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversial Dodo (1893), which was an instant success, and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama.

A prolific writer, Benson created the famous Mapp and Lucia series, which satirized upper-middle class British life in the 1920s and 30s. He also developed a reputation for writing macabre ghost stories and other stories of the supernatural, which have been adapted for film and television.