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.
