Stella Benson
Stella Benson ( born January 6, 1892 in Lutwyche Hall, Shropshire; † December 6, 1933 in Honkai, Tonkin ) was an English writer. In the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, it gained some notoriety all through her novels.
Life
Stella Benson was the third child of a wealthy English family. Because of her poor health, she spent most of her childhood and youth at home, where she has also taught. The family was traveling a lot and spent, among other things some time in Switzerland and in Germany. With 20 Benson undertook alone a trip to the British West Indies, which they processed I pose in her 1915 debut novel, published for the first time. After her return, she spent some time as a social worker in London and eventually founded a small company to manufacture paper bags. However, due to a lung disease they came to life not with the damp climate deal and eventually moved for some time to California where she pursued various smaller activities and eventually got a job at the University of California. During this time she published more novels and a book of poetry. During a trip to China, she met the Irish customs officers John O'Gorman Anderson, whom she married in 1921. Their honeymoon consisted of a journey through America with a Ford, which they later described in her novel The Little World. The marriage remained childless. The rest of her life she spent mostly in China, where she received her social commitment again. She was involved in a campaign against child prostitution in Hong Kong. However, most of the time she spent with her literary work. Benson died in 1933 of pneumonia.
Work
Typical of Benson's novels is a mixture of reality and fantasy. They often deal with controversial issues of their time as women's rights, colonial policy or the First World War and often edited them in a satirical way. Especially the British society it stands critically. Her previous novels are often located in lower class London. So the main character of This is the End is a young woman from better circumstances that makes its descent behind and works as a bus driver. Living Alone is located in the milieu of London's social worker. Later in her career, Benson dealt increasingly with Asia. Her most famous novel, Tobit Transplanted ( first in the U.S. as The Far -Away Bride published) is of Belorussian refugee families in Manchuria and Korea, which are brought to the background of the biblical book of Tobit. For this novel she was awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the AC Benson silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature. It was her last completed novel. She died while working on his successor Mundos, which was published posthumously in 1935. In addition to political motives descriptions of loneliness and alienation are typical of Benson's work. In part, it is compared with that of Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West. Virginia Woolf also was close to them, they also met in person. Woolf praised by Benson's death publicly repeated their work and their personality. At the time of her most famous publications Stella Benson enjoyed a relatively wide popularity.
Bibliography
- I pose ( 1915)
- This is the End ( 1917)
- Twenty (1918 )
- Living Alone ( 1919)
- Kwan -yin (1922 )
- The Poor Man ( 1922)
- Pipers and a Dancer (1924 )
- The Awakening (1925 )
- The Little World ( 1925)
- Goodbye Stranger (1926 )
- The Man Who Missed the Bus ( 1928)
- Worlds Within Worlds (1928 )
- Tobit Transplanted, also known as The Far -Away Bride (1930 )
- Hope Against Hope and other stories (1931 )
- Christmas Formula and other stories (1932 )
- Pull Devil, Pull Baker ( 1933)
- Mundos (1935 )
- Poems (1935 )
- Collected Short Stories ( 1935)