I Pose

📕 Stella Benson (1892-1933) was an English feminist, novelist, poet and travel writer whose father was a member of the landed gentry and whose aunt on her mother's side, Mary Cholmondeley, was a well-known novelist. Suffering ill-health in childhood (which persisted throughout her life), she attended schools in Germany and Switzerland and from the age of 10 began writing a diary which she kept up all her life. She spent the winter of 1913-14 in the West Indies which provided material for I Pose, her first novel published in 1915. On her return to London she became involved in women's suffrage and during WWI she helped poor women in the East End, these experiences inspiring her novels This is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919). In 1918 she travelled to the US, eventually joining a bohemian community of fellow writers in San Francisco and working at the University of California. In 1920 she continued on her travels, working at a mission school and hospital in China where she met her future husband, James O'Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. They married in London the following year and after a honeymoon crossing America in a Ford, Benson joined him on various Customs postings including Nanning, Pakhoi and Hong Kong. The couple had strong shared intellectual interests and continued to travel throughout the rest of their lives until Benson's death in Hongay in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin.