The Altar Fire

The journal of a successful novelist who has lost the power to write, kept as the years pass and the fire on the altar refuses to relight. Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory, was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and kept a diary of four million words — the longest in English. This 1907 book is fiction shaped exactly like his own depression, and it is the most honest thing he published. Fifty-eight plates of interiors and portraits by painters including Gwen John and William Rothenstein, from 1801 to 1920, echo the inward, unlit rooms of Benson's journal.