Benson spent the winter of 1913–14 in the
West Indies, which provided material for her first novel,
I Pose (1915). Living in London, she became involved in
women's suffrage, as had her older female relatives. 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
This Is the End (1917) and
Living Alone (1919).
Living Alone is a
fantasy novel about a woman whose life is transformed by a
witch. She also published her first volume of poetry,
Twenty, in 1918. Benson then decided that she wanted to see the world, leaving England for the United States in June 1918. After stops in New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Chicago, where along the way she met various American writers including
Bertha Pope and
Harriet Monroe, she went to stay with Bertha Pope in
Berkeley. In Berkeley and San Francisco from December 1918 through December 1919, she participated in a bohemian community that included
Albert Bender,
Anne Bremer,
Witter Bynner,
Sara Bard Field,
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, and Marie de Laveaga Welch. She took on a job at the
University of California as a tutor, then as an editorial reader for the university press. Her California experiences inspired her next novel,
The Poor Man (1922). In 1920, she went to China, where she worked in a mission school and hospital, and met the man who would be her husband, James (Shaemas) O'Gorman Anderson, an
Anglo-Irish officer in the
Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) Benson was a friend of
Winifred Holtby and, through her, of
Vera Brittain. The effects of the news of Benson's death on both women are recalled in Brittain's second volume of autobiography, the first volume of which is the better known
Testament of Youth (1933).
Virginia Woolf also knew Benson, and remarked in her diary after her death: 'A curious feeling: when a writer like Stella Benson dies, that one’s response is diminished; Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: its life lessened.' She was also a friend of
Naomi Mitchison, who devoted to Benson a chapter in her own autobiography
You May Well Ask, with extensive quotations from her correspondence with Benson in the 1920s and early 1930s. Benson's 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.
Appraisal According to George Malcolm Johnson, "Stella Benson had a unique ability to blend fantasy and reality, especially evident in her earlier novels and in her short stories. Her impish humour and wicked wit, frequently directed towards a satirical end, masked an underlying compassion. Benson's novels (especially her later more realistic ones) and stories often treat serious social issues and reflect her travails as a twentieth-century woman: supporting female suffrage, witnessing the tragedy of the First World War, and living in a hostile, volatile colonial setting. Despite her very modern, ironic treatment of the theme of individuals lost, isolated, and alienated in strange and frightening situations, she has not garnered much contemporary critical attention, and deserves reappraisal." == Death ==