Living Alone

Stella Benson (1892-1933) was an English feminist poet, travel writer, and novelist. Born into a wealthy Shropshire family, Benson was the niece of bestselling novelist Mary Cholmondeley. Educated from a young age, she lived in London, Germany, and Switzerland in her youth, which was marked by her parents’ acrimonious separation. As a young woman in London, she became active in the women’s suffrage movement, which informed her novels This Is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919). In 1918, Benson traveled to the United States, settling in Berkley for a year and joining the local Bohemian community. In 1920, she met her husband in China and began focusing on travel writing with such essay collections and memoirs as The Little World (1925) and World Within Worlds (1928). Benson, whose work was admired by Virginia Woolf, continued publishing novels, stories, and poems until her death from pneumonia in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin.