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. This edition of Stella Benson’s Twenty is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Circa l’autore
Stella Benson (1892-1933) was an English feminist poet, travel writer, and novelist. Born into a wealthy Shropshire family, Benson was the niece of bestselling novelist Mary Cholmondeley. Educated from a young age, she lived in London, Germany, and Switzerland in her youth, which was marked by her parents’ acrimonious separation. As a young woman in London, she became active in the women’s suffrage movement, which informed her novels This Is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919). In 1918, Benson traveled to the United States, settling in Berkley for a year and joining the local Bohemian community. In 1920, she met her husband in China and began focusing on travel writing with such essay collections and memoirs as The Little World (1925) and World Within Worlds (1928). Benson, whose work was admired by Virginia Woolf, continued publishing novels, stories, and poems until her death from pneumonia in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin.
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