Stella Benson
Stella Benson (1892-1933) was an English feminist, travel writer and novelist. Stella was often ill during her childhood. By her sixth birthday, she and her family, based in London, had moved frequently. She spent some of her childhood in Germany and Switzerland getting an education. She began writing a diary at the age of ten and kept it up for all of her life. By the time she was writing poetry, around the age of fourteen, her mother left her father; consequently, 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. Instead, Stella increased her writing output, adding novel-writing to her repertoire.
Stella was noted for being compassionate and interested in social issues. Like her older female relatives, she supported women's suffrage. 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's writings kept coming, but none of her works is 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. Her most famous work, the novel The Far-Away Bride, was published in the United States first in 1930 and as Tobit Transplanted in Britain in 1931. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. This was followed by two limited edition collections of short stories, Hope Against Hope (1931) and Christmas Formula (1932).
She died of pneumonia just before her forty-first birthday in December 1933, in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin. Her last unfinished novel Mundos and her personal selection of her best poetry, Poems, were published posthumously in 1935. Her Collected Stories were published in 1936. Anderson's sons from his second marriage were Benedict Anderson and Perry Anderson.
“Her grammar in moments of emergency always impressed Kew.”
“London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance. There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again.”
“They were not spontaneous people. They were born with too great a love of words, a passion for drama at the expense of truth, and a habit of overweighting common life with romance.”
“I want to go out into the country, I want to thread the pale Spring air, and hear the lambs cry. I want to brush my face against the grass, and wade in a wave of bluebells.”
“Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach.”
“That sea - that mother of a million summers,Who bore, with melody, a million springs,Shall sing for my enchantment...”
“Trees, skies, valleys mountains, seen through the rain-spotted windshield, were like a distorted, stippled landscape painted by a beginner who has not yet learned to wring living colour from his palette.”
“Come home, come home, you million ghosts,The honest years shall make amends,The sun and moon shall be your hosts,The everlasting hills your friends.”
“My love, I see you through my tears.No pity in your face I see.I have sailed far across the years;Stretch out, stretch out your arms to me.”
“The hoarse church-bells of London ring;The hoarser horns of London croak;The poor brown lives of London clingAbout the poor brown streets like smoke;The deep air stands above my roofLike water, to the floating stars.My friend and I - we sit aloof -We sit and smile, and bind our scars.”
“To-night the swinging stars shall plumbThe silence of the sky.”
“There pass the trav'lling dreams, and theseMy soul adores”
“And you shall find upon the beachThe traces of my dancing”