A focusing and deflection system with vertical beam landing and reduced aberrations was developed for direct electron beam lithography. The system consists of two magnetic lenses and a magnetic deflector. The excitations between the lenses are inverse to each other. The deflector, which has saddle‐type coils, is set inside the first lens. The pivot point introduced by the deflector and the first lens coincides with the focal point of the second lens to achieve a vertical beam landing. These arrangements and the operating conditions also enable minimized aberrations, especially elimination of transverse chromatic aberration. In computer simulation, the system gives a 2 mrad/mm landing angle coefficient and a 0.1 μm aberration disk after refocusing at each deflective point, when a converging semiangle of 2.5 mrad is used in a 3.2×3.2 mm2 deflection area at a 30 kV beam energy. The converging angle gives a current density of 10 A/cm2 using the LaB6 electron gun with 5×105A/cm2sr brightness. In the simulation, characteristics were also calculated for beam misalignment, quantization of cosine‐distributed deflection coils, and so forth. These results show the system to be feasible, free of serious errors, and suitable for realization. Experimental results also showed good performance. The system has been applied in variably shaped electron beam lithography machines and has successfully been used for 0.5 μm pattern drawing within 0.1 μm overall accuracy.