GLR May-June 2026

ESSAY E.F. Benson’s Lost Romance S ASHA G ARWOOD

W HEN THE ENGLISH WRITER E. F. Benson and the American artist George Wolfe Plank first caught each other’s eyes on the King’s Road Chelsea in early 1915, they came from different worlds. Edward Frederic Benson—Fred to those he loved—was in his late forties. Successful, famously witty, impeccably dressed, he’d been a bestselling novelist since the publication of Dodo in 1893 and a society figure even before that. His father had been Archbishop of Canterbury, his mother friends with Queen Victoria, and he combined connections with considerable charm. Plank, conversely, was orphaned young and working ten-hour days in a Pennsylvania factory for $1.25 a day before he was fourteen. But he taught himself to draw, and now, at age 32, his elegant, fantastical art was much sought after. His work for Vogue and Condé Nast defined the look of the era. For all their differences, there were similarities between Benson and Plank. They were both talented, popular, generous, caring—and queer. Plank had spent years embroiled in a pas sionate and romantically unrequited epistolary relationship with the older artist and dramaturg Edward Gordon Craig, and his later letters suggest that the combination of sensitivity, creativ ity, and authority was a potent lure. Benson’s diaries from Marl borough and Cambridge record passionate romances; his family talked openly of his proclivity for “the company of young men” and “Fred’s mysterious young friends”; and alongside his villa on the contemporary gay men’s paradise of Capri, he’d devel oped rather a habit of sweeping younger men off their feet. But by late 1914, when Plank moved into a studio at 55 Glebe Place in London, just around the corner from Benson’s house at 102 Oakley Street, Britain was at war. Many men were away; some were dying. Benson had lost “dozens of friends.” Even bohemian Chelsea vibrated with tension, desperation, and the breakdown of Edwardian certainties. Perhaps it’s unsur prising that after they crossed paths on the King’s Road—often enough to become familiar, fascinated—Plank wrote Benson a letter. Benson burned much correspondence before he died, espe cially anything he thought might “cause mischief,” so it’s in triguing that Plank’s approach to him survives in all its queer-coded glory. He describes his handsome neighbor as “un married, worldly, and witty”—all familiar queer signifiers—and quotes a Walt Whitman poem about strangers and desire. Whit man was a reference point for many men who loved men, and Benson responded accordingly: “He seemed so pleased to know that I loved Whitman, because he does too,” Plank reported in Sasha Garwood is writing a book about E. F. Benson and George Plank. She is an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham, UK.

genuously to his sister, “and we are developing a delightful friendship.” (Although he was excited enough to describe meet ing Benson in three successive letters over three weeks, he con structed a more anodyne chance meeting. His letter goes unmentioned.) Benson invited Plank to tea and played him Tchaikovsky (another queer signifier). Soon they were seeing each other every day, and Plank wrote: “I am … so happy I can scarcely realize it is I.” At first their contrasting backgrounds were a source of fas cination, and they swiftly integrated themselves into each

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