1 Stella Benson: a life of reading, writing and publishing Unpublished conference paper for SHARP July 2016, Paris Nicola Darwood, University of Bedfordshire, nicola.darwood@beds.ac.uk Stella Benson – feminist, diarist, novelist and travel writer – published her first novel, I Pose, in 1915. Her last book, a collection of short stories, was published posthumously in 1936. Although her diaries might suggest some reservations about the reception of her earlier novels, in a letter to Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1 Benson’s husband James O’Gorman Anderson said of her work: ‘Stella was quite happy about her writing, was sure of herself there, and had no thought of not being sufficiently appreciated.’ 2 Others shared that opinion; for example, her 1932 novel Tobit Transplanted (titled The Far-Away Bride in America) won the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature. 3 Drawing on Benson’s diaries and her correspondence with her publisher, Macmillan, this paper discusses the connections between Benson’s reading, her writing and the subsequent publication of her early novels, I Pose, This is the End (1917) and Living Alone (published in 1919). It also considers the role of the recent republication of her fiction by Michael Walmer in a possible reclamation and re-examination of Benson’s work in the twenty first century. Writing in 1934, just a year after Benson’s death, Phyllis Bottome stated ‘[w]hen Stella Benson died last year, the world lost one of its most truthful inhabitants’ 4 . Commenting that Benson never really felt sure of her literary skills, Bottome records a conversation with Benson: ‘A few months before her death she said to me “I feel I have got my tools now but I’m only just beginning to know how to handle them!’. 5 This is something that Benson also alluded to in her essay ‘About my Books’ published in 1933: If one could live on a consistent plan, I suppose it would be possible to write on a consistent plan. But short of this ideal – if it be an ideal – I do not know how anyone can discuss his or her work as though it had followed any conscious path of development through the changes of youth and middle age. I wonder if many writers, as they approach middle age, feel that all 1 Prolific author and sister of Hillaire Belloc 2 Anderson, J C O’G (1934) quoted in Grant, J (1987). Stella Benson: A Biography. (London: MacMillan, p.xiii). 3 Baldwin Davis, Marlene (2004) "Stella Benson". The Literary Encyclopedia. [online] http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=369 (accessed 25 November 2015). 4 Phyllis Bottome (1934) Stella Benson (San Francisco: Albert M Bender), 1 5 Phyllis Bottome (1934) Stella Benson (San Francisco: Albert M Bender), 3 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by University of Bedfordshire Repository