Letters of Stella Benson, 1923-1933

Author and feminist Stella Benson was born in Easthope, Shropshire, England, in 1892, the daughter of Ralph Beaumont Benson and Caroline Essex Cholmondeley. Her aunt, Mary Cholmondeley, was a novelist. Her parents separated when she was young and subsequently she rarely saw her father. She began keeping a diary when she was ten years old, continuing this practice throughout her life, and also began writing poetry and novels at an early age. She spent the winter of 1913 to 1914 in the West Indies; her first novel, I Pose, published in 1915, was inspired by her experiences there. While living in London during World War I, she became involved in women's suffrage and also worked with the Charity Organisation Society to provide assistance to women living in poverty in London's East End.

In 1918, Benson traveled to the United States, where she stayed for a time with the author Bertha Clark Pope Damon in Berkeley, California, and met art collector Albert K. Bender, artist Anne Bremer, poet Harold Witter Bynner, poet and suffragist Sara Bard Field, author Charles Erskine Scott Wood, and author and social reformer Marie de Laveaga Welch. Other friends and acquaintances included Virginia Woolf and fellow writers Harriet Monroe, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, and Naomi Mitchison. While in California, she worked as a tutor for the University of California and as a reader for the university press. In 1920, she went to China, where she worked in a mission school and hospital. While in China, she met James "Shaemas" O'Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. They married in London in 1921 and had two children, Benedict and Perry. Benson accompanied Anderson on Customs Service postings including Nanning, Pakhoi, and Hong Kong.

In addition to I Pass, Benson's writings include novels: This is the End (1917), Living Alone (1919), The Poor Man (1922), and Goodbye, Stranger (1926) ; poetry Twenty (1918); travel essays: The Little World (1925) and Worlds Within Worlds (1928); and stories: "The Man Who Missed the 'Bus" (1928) and the collections Pipers and a Dancer (1924), Hope Against Hope And Other Stories (1931) and Christmas Formula And Other Stories (1932). She also edited the memoirs of Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine. The resultant work, Pull Devil, Pull Baker, was named a Book of the Month by the American Literary Guild in 1933. Her most famous novel was published in the United States as The Far-Away Bride in 1930 and as Tobit Transplanted in England in 1931. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1932. An unfinished novel, Mundos, and a collection of poetry were published posthumously in 1935 and her collected stories were published in 1936. Benson died of pneumonia in December 1933.