Mapp and Lucia is a collective name for a series of novels by E. F. Benson, and also the name for two British television adaptations based on those novels The novels feature humorous incidents in the lives of (mainly) upper-middle-class British people in the 1920s and 1930s, vying for social prestige and one-upmanship in an atmosphere of extreme cultural snobbery. Several of them are set in the small seaside town of Tilling, closely based on Rye, East Sussex, where Benson lived for a number of years and (like Lucia) served as mayor. Lucia previously lived at Riseholme, based on Broadway,...

E F Benson's 'spook stories' pushed the boundaries of the ghost story tradition by exploring new, previously 'out of bounds' settings - such as public transport and even hauntings by daylight - to frighten his readers from the 1890s to the 1930s.