Stella Benson was an English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer.
Background
Stella Benson was born on January 6, 1892, in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, United Kingdom. By the time she was writing poetry, around the age of fourteen, her parents separated; subsequently, 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. When her father died, Stella learned that he had been an alcoholic.
Education
She spent some of her childhood in schools in Germany and Switzerland. She began writing a diary at the age of ten and kept it up for all of her life.
Career
It is surprising that Stella Benson’s books have been ignored since she died.
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. Benson then decided that she wanted to see the world, leaving England for the United States in June 1918. Her first stop was California, and she met many artists and writers 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, via a return to England in 1920, took her to China, where she worked in a mission school and hospital.
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.
She continued to travel throughout the rest of their lives.
She died of pneumonia on 7 December 1933, at Hongay in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin.
Benson was a member of Charity Organization Society.
Charity Organization Society
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"A curious feeling: when a writer like Stella Benson dies, that one’s response is diminished; Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it's life lessened". - Virginia Woolf
Connections
In 1920, she went to China, where she worked in a mission school and hospital, and met the man who would be her husband, James (Shaemas) O'Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and later father of Benedict Anderson and Perry Anderson. They married in London 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 threatened 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).