Stella Benson

Stella Benson (1892–1933) was an English feminist, travel writer, and novelist.

Early life

Benson was born to Ralph Benson, a member of the landed gentry, and Caroline Essex Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) at Lutwyche Hall in Shropshire in 1892. Stella's aunt, Mary Cholmondeley, was a novelist. Stella was often ill during her childhood. By her sixth birthday, she and her family, based in London, moved frequently. She spent some of her childhood in Germany and Switzerland getting an education. She began writing a diary at the age of ten and kept it up for all of her life. By the time she was writing poetry, around the age of fourteen, her mother left her father; consequently, she saw her father infrequently. When she did see him, he encouraged her to quit writing poetry for the time being, until she was older and more experienced. Instead, Stella increased her writing output, adding novel-writing to her repertoire. When her father died, Stella learned that he had been an alcoholic.

First works

Stella was noted for being compassionate and interested in social issues. Like her older female relatives, she supported women's suffrage. During World War I, she supported the troops by gardening and by helping poor women in London's East End at The Charity Organisation Society. These efforts inspired Benson to write the novels "I Pose" (1915), "This Is the End" (1917) and "Living Alone" (1919). She also published her first volume of poetry, "Twenty" in 1918.

The travelling life

Benson then decided that she wanted to see the world. Her first stop was California, and she met many artists in San Francisco and Berkeley, including Witter Bynner and Ansel Adams. She took on a job at The University of California as a tutor, then as an editorial reader for The University Press. These experiences inspired her next work, "The Poor Man" (1922).

Her next travels took her to China, where in 1920 she met the man who would be her husband, James (Sheamus) O’Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS). They married the following year. This was a complex relationship, but a very firm one. Benson followed Anderson through various Customs postings including Nanning, Pakhoi, and Hong Kong, even though her writings on China sometimes put her at odds with the Customs Service leadership (Anderson was theatened with dismissal if her writings touched on Customs affairs after one piece in The Nation in October 1927).

They had strong shared intellectual interests. Their honeymoon was spent crossing America in a Ford, and Benson wrote about this in "The Little World" (1925). They continued to travel throughout the rest of their lives.

Last works

Benson's writings kept coming, but none of her works are well known today. "Pipers and a Dancer" (1924) and "Goodbye, Stranger" (1926) were followed by another book of travel essays "Worlds Within Worlds" and the story "The Man Who Missed the 'Bus" in 1928. Her most famous work, the novel "The Far-Away Bride" was published in the United States first in 1930 and as "Tobit Transplanted" in Britain in 1931. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. This was followed by two limited edition collections of short stories, "Hope Against Hope" (1931) and "Christmas Formula" (1932).

She died of pneumonia just before her forty-first birthday in December 1933, in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin. Her last unfinished novel "Mundos" and her personal selection of her best poetry "Poems" were published posthumously in 1935. Her "Collected Stories" were published in 1936. Anderson's sons from his second marriage were Benedict Anderson and Perry Anderson.

References

*LiteraryEncyclopedia|author=Davis, Marlene Baldwin|article=Stella Benson|type=people|uid=369
* [http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/benson.htm Stella Benson page] at literaryheritage.org.uk

External links

*gutenberg author | id=Stella_Benson | name=Stella Benson
*worldcat id|lccn-n82-154745
*NRA|P591