Watersprings

A Cambridge don of fifty, comfortable and dry, takes a country living and discovers, too late to be dignified about it, that he has fallen in love with a girl of twenty-two. Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory, was Master of Magdalene College, and kept a diary of four million words — the longest in English. The self-knowledge in this 1913 novel is merciless, and it is entirely about himself. Fifty-nine plates span Dürer to Lavery, from a young woman's head to a portrait study, a quiet company of faces and flowers for a novel about looking too late.