Stella Benson (1) (1892–1933)
Author of Living Alone
Works by Stella Benson
Associated Works
Number 5. The Apple Disdained by R.H. Mottram [SIGNED] Number 6. The Man Who Missed the Bus by Stella Benson [SIGNED]… (1929) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1892-01-06
- Date of death
- 1933-12-06
- Burial location
- Ile de Charbon, Vietnam
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Lutwyche Hall, Shropshire, England, UK
- Place of death
- Honkai, Vietnam
- Places of residence
- London, England, UK
California, USA
Hong Kong
Nanning, China
Germany
Pakhoi, China (show all 7)
Switzerland - Occupations
- novelist
travel writer
social worker
tutor
editorial reader
feminist (show all 7)
poet - Relationships
- Cholmondeley, Mary (aunt)
Holtby, Winifred (friend) - Short biography
- Stella Benson was born at Lutwyche Hall in Shropshire, England, to a landed gentry family. Her maternal aunt Mary Cholmondeley was a well-known novelist. She spent some of her childhood at schools in Germany and Switzerland and began writing a diary at age 10. She spent the winter of 1913–1914 in the West Indies, which provided material for her first novel, I Pose (1915). On her return to England, she became involved in charitable work in London and active in the women's suffrage movement. During World War I, she wrote the novels This Is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919), and published her first volume of poetry, Twenty (1918). After the war, she went traveling in the USA, meeting American writers. She took various jobs, including as a tutor at the University of California and as an editorial reader for the university press. Her California experiences inspired her next novel The Poor Man (1922). In 1920, she went to China, where she worked in a mission school and hospital and met her husband, James O'Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. She accompanied Anderson to various postings in Asia and continued to write, although none of her works are well known today. Her late novel The Far-Away Bride, published in the USA in 1930, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for English writers in 1932. She died the following year at age 41 of pneumonia.
Members
Reviews
This is a novel about a witch and a social worker during the First World War, which is knowingly whimsical and occasionally goes as far as twee. It manages social realism about poverty and charity, magical realism, and full fantasy fiction within the same storyline. It's rare for a such an upbeat tale to include explorations of ideas of the undeserving poor, wartime rationing and air raids, dogfighting witches on broomsticks, and the dead rising from their graves. By the time she wrote this novel Stella Benson had clearly decided she could write and publish anything she wanted, and so she did exactly that. Readers will either find this depressing and delightful by turns or unbearably twee.
Warning for a dragon saying the n-word as part of an idiom, and then a second use as the authorial voice deconstructs outworn idioms:"Ever since the cowmen dipped me in the horse-pond my authority's gone — gone where the good niggers go."
I find that there are quite a lot of people who cannot say the word "gone" without adding the clause about the good niggers. These people have vague minds, sown like an allotment with phrases in grooves. [etc.]
Quotes
Familiar: "The drawer was evidently one of the many descendants of the Sword Excalibur — none but the appointed hand could draw it forth."
Amazing descriptions: "Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere."
Nothing changes: [...] "she had at the same time a half-time profession which, when she was well enough to follow it, brought twenty shillings a week to her pocket. She was in the habit of sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down very beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might have the benefit of all his forerunners' experience."
Hmm: "I have noticed that the girl's first love is the monopoly of the Victorian painter, whereas the boy's is that of the novelist, but I do not know the reason of this." [Perhaps because male creators wanted to look at women but identify with men?]
Land of the free (unless you're marginally left of right-wing politics): "I know quite a lot about America from a grey squirrel who rents my may-tree on Mitten Island. It is a long time since he came over, but he still chitters with a strong New England accent. He came away because he was a socialist. I gather America is too full of Liberty to leave room for socialism, isn't that so? My squirrel says there are only two parties in America, Republicans and Sinners—at least I think that was what he said—and anybody who belongs to neither of these parties is given penal servitude for life. So I understood, but I may be wrong. I am not very good at politics. Anyway, my squirrel had to leave the Home of Liberty and come to England, so as to be able to say what he thought."… (more)
Warning for a dragon saying the n-word as part of an idiom, and then a second use as the authorial voice deconstructs outworn idioms:
I find that there are quite a lot of people who cannot say the word "gone" without adding the clause about the good niggers. These people have vague minds, sown like an allotment with phrases in grooves. [etc.]
Quotes
Familiar: "The drawer was evidently one of the many descendants of the Sword Excalibur — none but the appointed hand could draw it forth."
Amazing descriptions: "Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere."
Nothing changes: [...] "she had at the same time a half-time profession which, when she was well enough to follow it, brought twenty shillings a week to her pocket. She was in the habit of sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down very beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might have the benefit of all his forerunners' experience."
Hmm: "I have noticed that the girl's first love is the monopoly of the Victorian painter, whereas the boy's is that of the novelist, but I do not know the reason of this." [Perhaps because male creators wanted to look at women but identify with men?]
Land of the free (unless you're marginally left of right-wing politics): "I know quite a lot about America from a grey squirrel who rents my may-tree on Mitten Island. It is a long time since he came over, but he still chitters with a strong New England accent. He came away because he was a socialist. I gather America is too full of Liberty to leave room for socialism, isn't that so? My squirrel says there are only two parties in America, Republicans and Sinners—at least I think that was what he said—and anybody who belongs to neither of these parties is given penal servitude for life. So I understood, but I may be wrong. I am not very good at politics. Anyway, my squirrel had to leave the Home of Liberty and come to England, so as to be able to say what he thought."… (more)
122/2020. This indescribable novel is difficult to review meaningfully, but as there aren't any previous reviews....
The novel is intensely whimsical. The book appears almost to be an entity narrating itself. It believes imaginative creativity can save the world, or at least save each of us inside our own internal worlds, or maybe it doesn't. It believes in ghosts and loving kindness and other physically impossible things, or maybe it doesn't. It was written in 1916 when the British military was engaged in a land and sea war with devastating loss of life, and London was under lethal air attack by the German military, and the most tragic passage is a deaf woman awaiting her son's return from the army, but the most aggressive passage is devoted not to warmongering but to defending Jewish immigrant women being exploited to death in factories without adequate health and safety. The plot, a fanciful quest, is mostly irrelevant to a reader's potential enjoyment, and the last section is wilfully titled "ANTI-CLIMAX". The writing style ranges freely from absolutely brilliant to utterly dreadful, and the structure has no chapters as such but is punctuated by occasional outbreaks of poetry, i.e. there are rhymes but no reason as the opening paragraph makes clear:
'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.'
Quotes
Framed: 'She wore spectacles with aggressive tortoise-shell rims. She said, "I am short-sighted. I am obliged to wear spectacles. Why should I try to conceal the fact? I will not have a pair of rimless ghosts haunting my face. I will wear spectacles without shame." But the real truth was that the tortoise-shell rims were more becoming to her.'
Intergenerational warfare written in 1916 (reminiscent of Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay): 'Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us? What's the use of this war of one generation against another? Old people and young people reach a deadlock that's as bad as marriage without the possibility of divorce. Isn't all forced fidelity wrong?'
Moar intergenerational woar: 'Cousin Gustus distrusted youth. He thought young people were always either lying to him or laughing at him, and indeed they often were. Only not so often as he thought.'
Pillow factory and anti-hair product-ism: '[...] why is it that when you're already frightened is the moment that men choose to frighten you? Because weakness is the worst crime. That I have proved. My work was putting fluff into bolsters. There was a big bright grocers' calendar — the Death of Nelson — and if I could see it through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day. I had to eat my lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches — not fruit jam, you know, but raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air. The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew newspapers. Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were standing on your head? My governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he looked wet, and his hair was a horror to me. His voice was tired of dealing with fluff—though he didn't deal with it so intimately as we did — and it only allowed him to whisper. The forewoman was always cross, but always as if she would rather not be so, as if she were being cross for a bet, and as if some one were watching her to see she was not kind by mistake. She looked terribly ill, because she had worked there for three months, which was a record. I stood it five weeks, and then I had a haemorrhage — only from the throat, the doctor said. I wanted to go to bed, but you can't, because the panel doctors in these parts will not come to you. My doctor was half an enormous mile away, and it seemed he only existed between seven and nine in the evenings. So I stayed up, so as not to get too weak to walk. I went and asked the governor for my stamps. I had only five stamps due to me, only five valuable threepences had been stopped out of my wages. But I had a silly conviction at that time that the Insurance Act was invented to help working people. What an absurd idea of mine! I went to the Jew for my card. He said mine was a hard case, but I was not entitled to a card; nobody under thirty, he said, was allowed by law to have a card. So I said it was only fair to tell him I was going to the Factory and Insurance Inspectors about him. I told him lots of things, and I was so angry that I cried. He was very angry too, and made me feel sick by splashing his wet hair about. He said it was unfair for ladies to interfere in things they knew nothing about. I said I interfered because I knew nothing about it, but that now I knew. I said that ladies and women had exactly the same kind of inside, and it was a kind that never thrived on fluff instead of food. I told him how I spent my ten shillings. He couldn't interrupt really, because he had no voice. Then I fainted, and a friend I have there, called Mrs. Love, came in. She had been listening at the door. She was very good to me. Then, when I was well again, I found another job, but I shan't tell you what it is. As for the Inspectors, I complained, but — what's the use? So long as you must put fluff of that pernicious kind into bolsters, just so long will you kill the strength and the beauty of women.'
Shiver: 'Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her. She knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your throat to your heart. She knows how you may go between trees in the moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may say some silly greeting that only your friend understands. And how your heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply. She knows how, walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the Thames. These are the ghost stories that never get told. Few people can read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of the Morning Post.'
Tides: 'The knocking of the slow sea upon the cliff seemed like the ticking of the great clock that is our world.'
A deaf mother on her son in the army coming home on leave (extract doesn't capture the whole passage, which I found moving): ' "I dare say you would think Murray a rotter if you met him. It doesn't matter much. It doesn't matter at all. Nothing matters, because he will come home to-night."
Kew fidgeted a moment, and then took the slate and wrote: "I am very much afraid that all leave from abroad has been stopped this week."
"Yes, I know," said the mother, "I have been unhappy about that for some days. But it doesn't make any difference to Murray now. You see, I heard last night that he was killed on Tuesday. That's why I know he will come, and I shall be waiting here." '
Tripe: 'His train was one which boasted a restaurant car, and Kew patronised this institution. But when he was in the middle of cold meat, he thought: "She is probably trying to live on twopence-halfpenny a week. Continual tripe and onions."
So he refused pudding. The pudding, persistent as only a railway pudding can be, came back incredulously three times. But Kew pushed it away.'
A 1916 London omnibus conductress's uniform skirt fell just below the knee but she stood up on a platform and the skirts were flared A-lines: 'The gaiters of the 'bus-conductor had shaken Kew to his foundations. The thought of the skirt still brought his heart into his mouth.' (Englishwomen, and more men, also began wearing pyjamas instead of nightdresses/nightshirts in case they were bombed at night.)
On imagined US pacifism, but not: '[...] patriotism will come in time to be considered a vice. How can one's soul — if you take my meaning — be effected by the latitude and longitude in which one's body was born? From the States the truth shall come, salvation shall dawn in the west.'… (more)
The novel is intensely whimsical. The book appears almost to be an entity narrating itself. It believes imaginative creativity can save the world, or at least save each of us inside our own internal worlds, or maybe it doesn't. It believes in ghosts and loving kindness and other physically impossible things, or maybe it doesn't. It was written in 1916 when the British military was engaged in a land and sea war with devastating loss of life, and London was under lethal air attack by the German military, and the most tragic passage is a deaf woman awaiting her son's return from the army, but the most aggressive passage is devoted not to warmongering but to defending Jewish immigrant women being exploited to death in factories without adequate health and safety. The plot, a fanciful quest, is mostly irrelevant to a reader's potential enjoyment, and the last section is wilfully titled "ANTI-CLIMAX". The writing style ranges freely from absolutely brilliant to utterly dreadful, and the structure has no chapters as such but is punctuated by occasional outbreaks of poetry, i.e. there are rhymes but no reason as the opening paragraph makes clear:
'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.'
Quotes
Framed: 'She wore spectacles with aggressive tortoise-shell rims. She said, "I am short-sighted. I am obliged to wear spectacles. Why should I try to conceal the fact? I will not have a pair of rimless ghosts haunting my face. I will wear spectacles without shame." But the real truth was that the tortoise-shell rims were more becoming to her.'
Intergenerational warfare written in 1916 (reminiscent of Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay): 'Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us? What's the use of this war of one generation against another? Old people and young people reach a deadlock that's as bad as marriage without the possibility of divorce. Isn't all forced fidelity wrong?'
Moar intergenerational woar: 'Cousin Gustus distrusted youth. He thought young people were always either lying to him or laughing at him, and indeed they often were. Only not so often as he thought.'
Pillow factory and anti-hair product-ism: '[...] why is it that when you're already frightened is the moment that men choose to frighten you? Because weakness is the worst crime. That I have proved. My work was putting fluff into bolsters. There was a big bright grocers' calendar — the Death of Nelson — and if I could see it through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day. I had to eat my lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches — not fruit jam, you know, but raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air. The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew newspapers. Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were standing on your head? My governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he looked wet, and his hair was a horror to me. His voice was tired of dealing with fluff—though he didn't deal with it so intimately as we did — and it only allowed him to whisper. The forewoman was always cross, but always as if she would rather not be so, as if she were being cross for a bet, and as if some one were watching her to see she was not kind by mistake. She looked terribly ill, because she had worked there for three months, which was a record. I stood it five weeks, and then I had a haemorrhage — only from the throat, the doctor said. I wanted to go to bed, but you can't, because the panel doctors in these parts will not come to you. My doctor was half an enormous mile away, and it seemed he only existed between seven and nine in the evenings. So I stayed up, so as not to get too weak to walk. I went and asked the governor for my stamps. I had only five stamps due to me, only five valuable threepences had been stopped out of my wages. But I had a silly conviction at that time that the Insurance Act was invented to help working people. What an absurd idea of mine! I went to the Jew for my card. He said mine was a hard case, but I was not entitled to a card; nobody under thirty, he said, was allowed by law to have a card. So I said it was only fair to tell him I was going to the Factory and Insurance Inspectors about him. I told him lots of things, and I was so angry that I cried. He was very angry too, and made me feel sick by splashing his wet hair about. He said it was unfair for ladies to interfere in things they knew nothing about. I said I interfered because I knew nothing about it, but that now I knew. I said that ladies and women had exactly the same kind of inside, and it was a kind that never thrived on fluff instead of food. I told him how I spent my ten shillings. He couldn't interrupt really, because he had no voice. Then I fainted, and a friend I have there, called Mrs. Love, came in. She had been listening at the door. She was very good to me. Then, when I was well again, I found another job, but I shan't tell you what it is. As for the Inspectors, I complained, but — what's the use? So long as you must put fluff of that pernicious kind into bolsters, just so long will you kill the strength and the beauty of women.'
Shiver: 'Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her. She knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your throat to your heart. She knows how you may go between trees in the moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may say some silly greeting that only your friend understands. And how your heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply. She knows how, walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the Thames. These are the ghost stories that never get told. Few people can read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of the Morning Post.'
Tides: 'The knocking of the slow sea upon the cliff seemed like the ticking of the great clock that is our world.'
A deaf mother on her son in the army coming home on leave (extract doesn't capture the whole passage, which I found moving): ' "I dare say you would think Murray a rotter if you met him. It doesn't matter much. It doesn't matter at all. Nothing matters, because he will come home to-night."
Kew fidgeted a moment, and then took the slate and wrote: "I am very much afraid that all leave from abroad has been stopped this week."
"Yes, I know," said the mother, "I have been unhappy about that for some days. But it doesn't make any difference to Murray now. You see, I heard last night that he was killed on Tuesday. That's why I know he will come, and I shall be waiting here." '
Tripe: 'His train was one which boasted a restaurant car, and Kew patronised this institution. But when he was in the middle of cold meat, he thought: "She is probably trying to live on twopence-halfpenny a week. Continual tripe and onions."
So he refused pudding. The pudding, persistent as only a railway pudding can be, came back incredulously three times. But Kew pushed it away.'
A 1916 London omnibus conductress's uniform skirt fell just below the knee but she stood up on a platform and the skirts were flared A-lines: 'The gaiters of the 'bus-conductor had shaken Kew to his foundations. The thought of the skirt still brought his heart into his mouth.' (Englishwomen, and more men, also began wearing pyjamas instead of nightdresses/nightshirts in case they were bombed at night.)
On imagined US pacifism, but not: '[...] patriotism will come in time to be considered a vice. How can one's soul — if you take my meaning — be effected by the latitude and longitude in which one's body was born? From the States the truth shall come, salvation shall dawn in the west.'… (more)
Five years ago, when I read Stella Benson’s first novel, I wrote:
"I don’t know what Stella Benson did, I don’t know how she did it, but she did it quite brilliantly.
I don’t want to – I don’t need to – pull her book apart to see how it works. I just want to wonder at it, to be impressed that it does!
And now, of course, I want to read everything else that she ever wrote!"
It shouldn’t have taken me so long to read another book, but I didn’t have one to hand and I was distracted by other books, until The Man of the House came home with a copy of The Poor Man that he had picked up for me.
Edward R Williams is the poor man of the title, an Englishman who was alone in the world since the death of his brother, who was socially awkward and a little deaf, and who was in the slightly position of having enough money to not need to work but no more than that.
He had settled in San Francisco and fallen in with an arty set. Rhoda Romero, Avery Bird, Banner Hope and Melsie Stone Ponting had no great love for Edward, they didn’t really understand who he was and why he was always around, but they were so self-important and so caught up in their own concerns that they didn’t think to question his presence.
Emily Frere was the assistant of the famous journalist Tam McTab and she travelled the world with him and his wife. Edward met her at a party and he was utterly smitten. She was everything that he wasn’t; she was bright, she was sociable, she was emphatic and she loved life.
Edward adored Emily and he was sure that she cared for him; because she listened, because she was always kind.
The elements of this story are beautifully balanced – the satire of the arty set, the tragicomedy of Edward, and the vitality of Emily – and the author’s voice was perfect. It was distinctive, she had a lovely turn of phrase, she had a sharp eye, and it was clear that she knew and was fond of San Francisco; though it was obvious that she was fonder of the surrounding countryside than the city itself.
Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their countryside are equally suburban. No one has a country house in California; no one has a city house. It is good to see trees from city windows, but it is not so good to see houses from country windows. This however, for better or for worse, seems to be California’s ideal, and she will not rest until she has finished turning herself into one long and lovely Lower Tooting.
When Edward learned that that Emily had travelled to China with the McTabs he knew that he had to follow them. He lacked the means to make such a journey, and so he set about earning a his passage. It was clear from the start that Edward was not cut out to be a salesman, but his brief career in sales did result in him being propelled to China. He fell into another job, teaching English, but he wasn’t cut out for that either.
Stella Benson walked the line between tragedy and comedy beautifully, and somehow she drew me into the story of this desperately poor man.
Would he find Emily?
What would happen if he did?
What would happen if he didn’t?
I can’t say, but I can say that the end of the story both powerful and inevitable.
I loved the way that Stella Benson illuminated very real human lives and situations in this unlikely tale, and that though the arc of the story was improbable every moment in it rang true.
This book came seven years after the other book of hers that I have read, and it lacks that books whimsicality but it has other things that more than make up for that. It has wisdom, it has clarity, and it has something to say.
The writing is wonderfully vivid, few other authors could have made the story of this poor man so compelling, and I can’t think of any author who could have told this story so very well.… (more)
"I don’t know what Stella Benson did, I don’t know how she did it, but she did it quite brilliantly.
I don’t want to – I don’t need to – pull her book apart to see how it works. I just want to wonder at it, to be impressed that it does!
And now, of course, I want to read everything else that she ever wrote!"
It shouldn’t have taken me so long to read another book, but I didn’t have one to hand and I was distracted by other books, until The Man of the House came home with a copy of The Poor Man that he had picked up for me.
Edward R Williams is the poor man of the title, an Englishman who was alone in the world since the death of his brother, who was socially awkward and a little deaf, and who was in the slightly position of having enough money to not need to work but no more than that.
He had settled in San Francisco and fallen in with an arty set. Rhoda Romero, Avery Bird, Banner Hope and Melsie Stone Ponting had no great love for Edward, they didn’t really understand who he was and why he was always around, but they were so self-important and so caught up in their own concerns that they didn’t think to question his presence.
Emily Frere was the assistant of the famous journalist Tam McTab and she travelled the world with him and his wife. Edward met her at a party and he was utterly smitten. She was everything that he wasn’t; she was bright, she was sociable, she was emphatic and she loved life.
Edward adored Emily and he was sure that she cared for him; because she listened, because she was always kind.
The elements of this story are beautifully balanced – the satire of the arty set, the tragicomedy of Edward, and the vitality of Emily – and the author’s voice was perfect. It was distinctive, she had a lovely turn of phrase, she had a sharp eye, and it was clear that she knew and was fond of San Francisco; though it was obvious that she was fonder of the surrounding countryside than the city itself.
Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their countryside are equally suburban. No one has a country house in California; no one has a city house. It is good to see trees from city windows, but it is not so good to see houses from country windows. This however, for better or for worse, seems to be California’s ideal, and she will not rest until she has finished turning herself into one long and lovely Lower Tooting.
When Edward learned that that Emily had travelled to China with the McTabs he knew that he had to follow them. He lacked the means to make such a journey, and so he set about earning a his passage. It was clear from the start that Edward was not cut out to be a salesman, but his brief career in sales did result in him being propelled to China. He fell into another job, teaching English, but he wasn’t cut out for that either.
Stella Benson walked the line between tragedy and comedy beautifully, and somehow she drew me into the story of this desperately poor man.
Would he find Emily?
What would happen if he did?
What would happen if he didn’t?
I can’t say, but I can say that the end of the story both powerful and inevitable.
I loved the way that Stella Benson illuminated very real human lives and situations in this unlikely tale, and that though the arc of the story was improbable every moment in it rang true.
This book came seven years after the other book of hers that I have read, and it lacks that books whimsicality but it has other things that more than make up for that. It has wisdom, it has clarity, and it has something to say.
The writing is wonderfully vivid, few other authors could have made the story of this poor man so compelling, and I can’t think of any author who could have told this story so very well.… (more)
1 
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BeyondEdenRock | Dec 3, 2019 | Awards
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I Pose completely falls apart when the characters alight on a Caribbean island that is an English colony. This is the most racist book I have ever encountered—it makes Tarzan of the Apes and Penrod look real good. Reading this novel, I felt unclean. I don’t really want to get into the details, but I will say, I think a lot of times people have this idea that racist English people from a century ago were just old-fashioned but meant no harm; it was all kind of a misunderstanding, god love ‘em. I Pose makes it clear that this rosy assessment is not the case—one hundred years ago, racists hated black people with vicious cruelty and made fun of everything they could think of about them and literally did not care if they lived or died.
There was a kinda interesting part at the end where the suffragette goes into a poor neighborhood in London and tries to get the women to unionize, leave their alcoholic and abusive husbands, etc. but all her schemes backfire. This bit seemed heartfelt and true to life. Now I’m going to go ahead and spoil the ending, since I don’t recommend this book anyway. The gardener and the suffragette decide to get married, but instead, the suffragette shouts, “I hate god!” and runs into the church and blows it up, killing herself. The end. What??
I looked up Stella Benson on Wikipedia to see what was her deal, anyway, and it turns out she was a feminist and a suffragette (it wasn’t clear from the novel which side she was on) and that she lived all over the world, including China and Vietnam. From her bio I would think oh, I can’t wait to read a book by this neglected woman writer but having read this novel I say, never again, Stella Benson, you deserve to be forgotten.
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