Stella Benson's debut was one of the most acclaimed of her
generation: "One of the brightest, most original, and best written
books that have come my way for a long time," wrote Sir Henry Lucy.
"As the mature work of an experienced author it would have been a
remarkable achievement: being 'the first book of a new writer' it
is an astonishing performance, ' hailed the reviewer from The Daily
Graphic. In this incredibly original satirical novel we are
introduced to the two main characters as The Gardener and The
Suffragette, and so they remain throughout. Inhabiting a huge first
chapter of 302 pages and then only a tiny second one of 8 pages,
these two are wildly comic and disturbingly real at one and the
same time. Benson's cheekiness in commenting directly to the reader
on the progress of the story, the saltiness of her slightly cynical
view of the world and its ways, and the strange newness of the tale
she was telling meant that, on first publication in 1915, the
literary world's curiosity was most certainly piqued. We begin by
following The Gardener in a shambolic and romantic walking journey,
as his inexperience leads him a merry dance through youth's many
poses, away from his shabby boarding house in London, toward the
coast. Along the way, he falls for The Suffragette, but she rejects
him. The problem is, she likes him, despite herself. But is she
capable of traditional love? And so we also follow her, led through
not only her political convictions, but also all the less certain
parts of her personality, about which she is blindingly honest. Can
she fit love for The Gardener into her busy passion for women's
rights? Does she really want to? She thinks probably not. And
yet... Both of them are the beautifully mixed, endearingly crazy
creations of Benson's unusual talent, which spins its fizzing wit
on a sixpence, creating absurd comedy and wise satire out of thin
air. Delivering, in its fools' progress, one of the significant
debuts of its era and one of the funniest novels of the suffragette
movement in one package, I Pose was hailed immediately as a classic
of a new kind, establishing Stella Benson as a fresh genius of the
human spirit, in all its poses. STELLA BENSON was born at Lutwyche
Hall on Wenlock Edge in Shropshire in 1892. Having escaped
restrictive family life, she worked in London in the suffrage
movement and in social work in the poorest areas. She married
Shaemas O'Gorman Anderson in 1921, and travelled the world with him
to his many diplomatic posts, mainly in China. She wrote eight
witty, highly individual, acclaimed novels, as well as stories,
travel essays and poetry. Consumptive for most of her life, she
died in Hongay in French Indochina in 1933, at the age of 41. On
her death, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary "A curious feeling:
when a writer like Stella Benson dies, that one's response is
diminished; Here and Now won't be lit up by her: it's life
lessened."
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