Bøger af Stella Benson

Stella Benson's debut was one of the most acclaimed of her generation:"e;One of the brightest, most original, and best written books that have come my way for a long time,"e; wrote Sir Henry Lucy. "e;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. 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.

As the war drew to a close, its heavy toll weighed mightily on Stella Benson's heart. Any means of escape was viable, as long as it took her truth with it. Living Alone, the most fantastical and delightfully wayward of her first three novels, was her exhausted mind's perfect project for the times. In the dark days of 1918, Sarah Brown, who is a little tired and dispirited, and also not completely well, is minding her own business, doing what she ought in helping the poor in her rundown part of London. She is the much put-upon dogsbody of a small committee designed to assist needy cases. At the latest dull meeting with Mrs Meta Ford, Lady Arabel Higgins and the Mayor there is an extraordinary interruption as a youngish woman storms into the room and hides under the table. It eventuates that she is being chased for the capital crime of stealing a bun from a baker's shop! This crazy meeting is a critical one in Sarah's life. The young woman, whose name is never quite clear, turns out to be something quite unexpected - a witch. Sarah forms a bond with her, fascinated by this explosion of magic in a desperately hurt and drab world. As she meets the witch's outré associates and talks the kind of wildly honest sense with her that has seemed missing for so long, she finds herself on adventures involving forbidden sandwiches, soldiers who are wizards, meeting ghosts in an air raid shelter, and cloudfights with an evil German witch, all punctuated with her witch's little paper packets of magic, whose effects tend to turn dreary people into fascinating beings. This intriguing novel of great tenderness and smart wit also betrays the sense of enervated tension that was prevalent in Britain after five long years of horror. It is a plaintive cry for peace, beauty and humanity in a world made brutal. Living Alone was first published in 1919.

"It is the second step of a very brilliant beginning.....You will be foolish if you miss this book." Punch "This book shows one thing very clearly, that Miss Benson is a force to be reckoned with." Pall Mall Gazette Stella Benson's subtle, beautiful and poignant second novel built upon the phenomenal success of her first, I Pose, which sported crazy wit and bright conceits. In the spring of 1916, we meet orphaned sister and brother Jay and Kew Martin in London. Jay (real name Jane Elizabeth) has run away from her strange, claustrophobic, interfering, well-heeled family to the simplicities of the 'Brown Borough' (otherwise Hackney), to live amongst its working-class people, to a job as a bus conductor, and to discover her own wild self. Kew is on recuperative leave from the War, and manages to find Jay in her humble new abode. She begs him to preserve her newfound freedom and not reveal her whereabouts to their family. But nothing can stop their former guardians, the eccentric writer Anonyma Martin and her husband, their dry cousin Gustus, from setting out to try to find her, using clues from Jay's letters. The problem is, Jay's letters have been fabricated from her extraordinary dream-filled imagination; she's set them on a wild goose-chase! Benson subtly reveals a lot more of her personal philosophy in This is the End. She speaks in an enigmatic, haunting and deeply felt way about the power of dreams and fantasies. She also adds two other new ingredients - poignantly sad observation of life, love, and the world, and revelatory cries of pain about the savagery and horror of the War, at the very centre of whose appalling cost she was writing, right at the crucial juncture between Victorianism and Modernity. First published in 1917, This is the End has the magnificent wit and brightness of mind which established Benson's reputation for originality, and combines them with a fresh strength of emotion and poetic expression which make for one of the most unusual and moving novels set in the home front of the First World War.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.