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9781922491480

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Stella Benson will always be something of a 'writer's writer.' Excellent workmanship joined to insight ... Gifted. - The New York Times Stella Benson was a true original, and This Is The End can be read either as a bizarre, witty comedy with a hidden social commentary, or ... something even stranger, and (perhaps) closer to genius. It's nearly a century since This Is The End was written, and I think she might still be ahead of her time. - Simon Thomas, Shiny New Books Benson leaps to the fictional equivalent of differential geometry ... [She] also manages to address a profound issue about the relationship between perception and reality that no less weighty a thinker than Ludwig Wittgenstein was grappling with at roughly the same time. An unrecognised precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. Benson belongs in the same canon as Calvino, Borges, and Queneau. - Brad Bigelow, Neglected Books I scarcely know how to praise her, for her gifts are so elusive and so great. - Sheila Kaye-Smith Stella Benson had a unique ability to blend fantasy and reality ... Her impish humour and wicked wit, frequently directed towards a satirical end, masked an underlying compassion ... 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. - George Malcolm Johnson Stella Benson, of all modern writers, typified that with the most courage, the most humour, and the most skill. She was an artist who gives the impression of never having spent a moment worrying how to be an artist. - Robin Hyde I discovered her in a Rebecca West letter and an entry in Virginia Woolf's diary. The thought that I could have gone on without knowing Benson's work is bafflingly scary. - Yiyun Li, The Guardian Benson's novels are witty and haunting ... they develop a specifically feminine consciousness [and] seem to glimmer with ethereal magic. Original and significant. For those who dare the disarming challenge, she waits to be appreciated. - Meredith Bedell We hardly dare to use the thumb-marked phrase, 'a born writer'; but if it means anything Miss Stella Benson is one. She seems to write like a child gathering flowers ... - Katherine Mansfield, The Athenaeum One of the brightest, most original, and best written books that have come my way for a long time - Sir Henry Lucy. A highly original novelist whose tragic view of life is artfully disposed behind a facade of remarkable comic wit - David Daiches Stella Benson has the same kind of wild and prickling humor that is in James Stephens' Demigods ... enchanting absurdity and tenderness ... our own private idea of a truly great book. Christopher Morley, New York Evening Post

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Between the First and Second World Wars Stella Benson 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.

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