Books by Stella Benson

This Is the End (1917) is a novel by Stella Benson. Based on the author's experience in the movement for women's suffrage, This Is the End is a story of identity and social class set in the London neighborhood of Hackney. As Jay attempts to break from her restrictive past, her brother Kew returns from the First World War scarred by his experiences and disillusioned with life at home. Benson's meditative, diaristic prose guides the reader along the paths of change and confrontation faced by her protagonists, immersing them in the tumultuous decade in which the novel was written. "This is the end, for the moment, of all my thinking, this is my unfinal conclusion. There is no reason in tangible things, and no system in the ordinary ways of the world. Hands were made to grope, and feet to stumble, and the only things you may count on are the unaccountable things. System is a fairy and a dream, you never find system where or when you expect it. There are no reasons except reasons you and I don't know." Guided by a philosophical sense of the world, Jay-formerly Jane Elizabeth-longs to escape the confines of her life in the countryside. Without telling her family, she leaves for London and adopts a new identity, exposing herself for the first time in her life to the rhythms of working-class existence. When her brother Kew returns from the Great War and fails to find her at home, he comes to the city in search of his sister. Bonded by tragedy, the two orphans grow to respect one another as adults, both of them scarred in their own way by the expectations placed on young men and women in a decade of tremendous cultural change. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Stella Benson's This Is the End is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

Twenty (1918) is a poetry collection by Stella Benson. Largely recognized for her work as an activist in the women¿s suffrage movement and for her popular novels, Benson was also an accomplished poet. Twenty, her debut volume, is a collection indebted to symbolism in which Benson reflects on her experiences as a young woman in a rapidly changing world. In ¿The Secret Day,¿ Benson muses on the impossibility of peace in a time that refuses to slow: ¿My yesterday has gone, has gone and left me tired, / And now to-morrow comes and beats upon the door / [¿] / So I have built To-day, more precious than a dream; / And I have painted peace upon the sky above.¿ Responding to the horrors of a decade torn by war, Benson does what she can to maintain her own personal calm, to build a safe space apart from the world. In ¿Redneck¿s Song,¿ she laments the years of her life spent obeying ¿the laws of men / Who worshipped law,¿ declaring instead that ¿Those laws are dust / To-day¿¿ In these poems shaped by her experience as an activist and pioneering feminist, the personal is inseparable from the political. Benson¿s identity, her present and her future, depend on this revolutionary thrust¿no longer will she ¿shut [her] eyes¿ and ¿hold [her] tongue.¿ It may be ¿their path,¿ but she will make her own ¿groove,¿ her own way through life. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Stella Benson¿s Twenty is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

In Pull Devil, Pull Baker, Stella Benson presents the memoirs of a vagabond former Russian nobleman she met in a Shanghai pauper's ward, but with an accompanying commentary that questions the truth of anyone's memories in a strikingly contemporary and post-modern way. This is the first reissue of the book since its publication over 90 years ago.

As the war drew to a close, its heavy toll weighed mightily on Stella Benson's heart. Any means of escape was viable, as long as it took her truth with it. Living Alone, the most fantastical and delightfully wayward of her first three novels, was her exhausted mind's perfect project for the times. In the dark days of 1918, Sarah Brown, who is a little tired and dispirited, and also not completely well, is minding her own business, doing what she ought in helping the poor in her rundown part of London. She is the much put-upon dogsbody of a small committee designed to assist needy cases. At the latest dull meeting with Mrs Meta Ford, Lady Arabel Higgins and the Mayor there is an extraordinary interruption as a youngish woman storms into the room and hides under the table. It eventuates that she is being chased for the capital crime of stealing a bun from a baker's shop! This crazy meeting is a critical one in Sarah's life. The young woman, whose name is never quite clear, turns out to be something quite unexpected - a witch. Sarah forms a bond with her, fascinated by this explosion of magic in a desperately hurt and drab world. As she meets the witch's outré associates and talks the kind of wildly honest sense with her that has seemed missing for so long, she finds herself on adventures involving forbidden sandwiches, soldiers who are wizards, meeting ghosts in an air raid shelter, and cloudfights with an evil German witch, all punctuated with her witch's little paper packets of magic, whose effects tend to turn dreary people into fascinating beings. This intriguing novel of great tenderness and smart wit also betrays the sense of enervated tension that was prevalent in Britain after five long years of horror. It is a plaintive cry for peace, beauty and humanity in a world made brutal. Living Alone was first published in 1919.

"It is the second step of a very brilliant beginning.....You will be foolish if you miss this book." Punch "This book shows one thing very clearly, that Miss Benson is a force to be reckoned with." Pall Mall Gazette Stella Benson's subtle, beautiful and poignant second novel built upon the phenomenal success of her first, I Pose, which sported crazy wit and bright conceits. In the spring of 1916, we meet orphaned sister and brother Jay and Kew Martin in London. Jay (real name Jane Elizabeth) has run away from her strange, claustrophobic, interfering, well-heeled family to the simplicities of the 'Brown Borough' (otherwise Hackney), to live amongst its working-class people, to a job as a bus conductor, and to discover her own wild self. Kew is on recuperative leave from the War, and manages to find Jay in her humble new abode. She begs him to preserve her newfound freedom and not reveal her whereabouts to their family. But nothing can stop their former guardians, the eccentric writer Anonyma Martin and her husband, their dry cousin Gustus, from setting out to try to find her, using clues from Jay's letters. The problem is, Jay's letters have been fabricated from her extraordinary dream-filled imagination; she's set them on a wild goose-chase! Benson subtly reveals a lot more of her personal philosophy in This is the End. She speaks in an enigmatic, haunting and deeply felt way about the power of dreams and fantasies. She also adds two other new ingredients - poignantly sad observation of life, love, and the world, and revelatory cries of pain about the savagery and horror of the War, at the very centre of whose appalling cost she was writing, right at the crucial juncture between Victorianism and Modernity. First published in 1917, This is the End has the magnificent wit and brightness of mind which established Benson's reputation for originality, and combines them with a fresh strength of emotion and poetic expression which make for one of the most unusual and moving novels set in the home front of the First World War.

Stella Benson's debut was one of the most acclaimed of her generation:"e;One of the brightest, most original, and best written books that have come my way for a long time,"e; wrote Sir Henry Lucy. "e;As the mature work of an experienced author it would have been a remarkable achievement: being 'the first book of a new writer' it is an astonishing performance,' hailed the reviewer from The Daily Graphic. In this incredibly original satirical novel we are introduced to the two main characters as The Gardener and The Suffragette, and so they remain throughout. Inhabiting a huge first chapter of 302 pages and then only a tiny second one of 8 pages, these two are wildly comic and disturbingly real at one and the same time. Benson's cheekiness in commenting directly to the reader on the progress of the story, the saltiness of her slightly cynical view of the world and its ways, and the strange newness of the tale she was telling meant that, on first publication in 1915, the literary world's curiosity was most certainly piqued. Both of them are the beautifully mixed, endearingly crazy creations of Benson's unusual talent, which spins its fizzing wit on a sixpence, creating absurd comedy and wise satire out of thin air. Delivering, in its fools' progress, one of the significant debuts of its era and one of the funniest novels of the suffragette movement in one package, I Pose was hailed immediately as a classic of a new kind, establishing Stella Benson as a fresh genius of the human spirit, in all its poses.