‘Gifted … a ‘writer’s writer.’ Excellent workmanship joined to insight.’ The New York Times
‘Unjustly forgotten British literary fantasy … their masterpiece … well worth rediscovering.’ The Washington Post
Living Alone (1919) is Stella Benson’s unique and haunting masterpiece about a woman whose life is transformed by a witch in war-torn London. Benson’s meditative, diaristic prose guides the reader alongside her protagonist, a young woman introduced to a world of witchcraft at ‘the House of Living Alone.’ Over the greyness and misery of daily life in London during the continuing First World War is embroidered the bright antics of a witch unhampered by deceit or redundant convention. Under the humour and the light handling, this is an angry book, raging against the world. Considered a pioneering work of fantasy fiction and an unrecognised precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War.
‘An unrecognised precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. Benson belongs in the same canon as Calvino, Borges, and Queneau.’ Neglected Books
‘The thought that I could have gone on without knowing Benson’s work is bafflingly scary.’ The Guardian
‘I admit I envy you.’ Virginia Woolf
About the Author
Between the First and Second World Wars, Stella Benson (1892-1933) ranked high among English novelists, spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield. Witty, humorous and satirical, she was a shrewd observer of human nature; but she also looked at the world with a poet’s eyes, as if startled by its beauty and oddness. Stella won the admiration and society of some of the foremost writers of the time – the Woolfs, Winifred Holtby and H. G. Wells. International acclaim greeted her novels and she seemed set for still greater success when in 1933, aged only forty–one, she died.
A personality of fascinating complexity; a gay social character and a profound introspective; a fantasist and a practical achiever; an intensely female woman deeply unsure of her own femininity; a semi–invalid determined to live her life to the full.
Undeterred by the illness that dogged her all her life, Stella shook off her comfortable background and threw herself into women’s suffrage, did wartime social work in London’s East End and laboured on the land. She travelled the world, visiting the USA, India, Japan and Hong Kong, and her marriage to a member of the Chinese customs service took her to live in remote outposts of China.
A brave and remarkable woman who produced some of the most original fiction of her day.
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