Stella Benson

Stella Benson (6 January 1892 – 7 December 1933) was an English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer.

Benson was born to Ralph Beaumont Benson (1862–1911), a member of the landed gentry, and Caroline Essex Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) at Lutwyche Hall in Shropshire in 1892. Stella's aunt, Mary Cholmondeley, was a well-known novelist. Stella was often ill during her childhood and throughout her life. By her sixth birthday, she and her family, based in London, had moved frequently. She spent some of her childhood in schools in Germany and Switzerland. She began writing a diary at the age of ten and kept it up for all of her life. By the time she was writing poetry, around the age of fourteen, her parents separated; subsequently, she saw her father infrequently. When she did see him, he encouraged her to quit writing poetry for the time being, until she was older and more experienced. Instead, Stella increased her writing output, adding novel-writing to her repertoire. When her father died, Stella learned that he had been an alcoholic.

Stella 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).

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