E. F. Benson’s Robin Linnet is a novel following its young hero through university and into the wider world on the eve of the First World War. Benson, best known for his witty social comedies, here traces the development of a young man amid the friendships, loves, and ambitions of his early adult life, against the gathering shadow of the coming conflict.
The book combines Benson’s characteristic social observation with a portrait of youth shaped by the values of school and university and tested by the demands of a changing age. It captures the atmosphere of England in the years just before the war. For readers who enjoy Benson’s fiction, university life, and Edwardian social novels, it offers an engaging and well-drawn story.