Nevertheless, in 1913, against her mother's objections, 21-year-old Stella Benson left her home in Shropshire for an independent life in London, where she took up a series of jobs to support herself, producing novels which eventually brought her fame as a modernist writer and launching her own "private Stellarian Suffrage Campaign" of argument and persuasion.īy the spring of 1913, the suffrage movement had turned confrontational. Judged too sick to attend school, she had been tutored at home by governesses. Moreover, Benson was a frail child, beset by serious respiratory illnesses, often bedridden for months. At that time, it was usual for girls of her upper-class status to remain in their parents' keep, reared as Edwardian ladies, supported at home until marriage. It is difficult to imagine a less likely candidate for feminine independence than Stella Benson. In 1910, forced by severe illness to spend 18 months convalescing in a sanatorium, Benson, aged 18, devoted her time to reading and reflecting on the feminist ideas and arguments which were then drawing considerable attention in the popular intellectual and political press she determined to strike out on her own. Stella Benson came of age during the woman's suffrage movement in early 20th-century England. I Pose (1915) This Is the End (1917) (poems) Twenty (1918) Living Alone (1919) Kwan-Yin (1922) The Poor Man (1922) Pipers and a Dancer (1924) (self-illustrated essays) The Little World (1925) The Awakening: A Fantasy (1925) Goodbye, Stranger (1926) (self-illustrated essays) Worlds within Worlds (1928) The Man Who Missed the Bus: A Story (1928) The Far-Away Bride (1930, republished as Tobit Transplanted, 1931) Hope Against Hope and Other Stories (1932) Christmas Formula and Other Stories (1931) (with Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine, K.M.) Pull Devil, Pull Baker (1933) Mundos: An Unfinished Novel (1935) Poems (1935) Collected Short Stories (1936). with husband moved to China with husband, settling in Mengtsz (1922–25), then Shanghai, followed by Lung Ching Tsun (1925–27), Nanning (1929–30), Hong Kong (1930–31), and Pakhoi (1931–33). Benson silver medal for service to literature (1932).īegan lifelong practice of writing diary (1901) wrote I Pose (1915), a feminist satire about the suffrage movement wrote novels, poems, and short stories, mixing fantasy and satire traveled alone, often ill but self-supporting, to Berkeley, California (1918–19), to China and India (1920–21) traveled to the U.S. Awards:įrench Vie Heureuse Prize (1932) for Tobit Transplanted ( published in U.S. Born Stella Benson on January 6, 1892, in Shropshire, England died on December 6, 1933, in Hongay in the Chinese province of Tongking (now Vietnam), of pneumonia and heart failure buried on the Ile de Charbon near Baie d'Along daughter of Caroline Essex (Cholmondeley) and Ralph Beaumont Benson, both landed gentry educated at home married Shaemus (James) O'Gorman Anderson (a Chinese government customs official), on Septemchildren: none. Name variations: Stella Benson O'Gorman Anderson. Modernist English novelist, poet, and travel writer who actively campaigned for women's rights before and during World War I and in Hong Kong during the early 1930s.
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