Stella Benson: a life of reading, writing and publishing

Stella Benson – feminist, diarist, novelist and travel writer – published her first novel, I Pose, in 1915.  Her last book, a collection of short stories, was published posthumously in 1936.  Although her diaries might suggest some reservations about the reception of her earlier novels, in a letter to Marie Belloc Lowndes, Benson’s husband James O’Gorman Anderson said of her work: ‘Stella was quite happy about her writing, was sure of herself there, and had no thought of not being sufficiently appreciated.’  Others shared that opinion; for example, her 1932 novel Tobit Transplanted (titled The Far-Away Bride in America) won the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Benson’s writing was informed by her reading; she was an avid reader throughout her life and talked at length in her diaries about books that she enjoyed.  She often read a book in a day and it is evident from her diaries that she was always keen to read contemporary, Modernist and avant-garde poets and authors such Sturge Moore, Dorothy Richardson and Ford Maddox Ford (reading, for example, The Good Soldier in just one day on 3rd January 1918).  Her diaries, for the most part unpublished, provide a rich source of material, detailing both her reading and her writing.  Drawing extensively on those diaries, this paper discusses the connections between Benson’s reading, her writing and the subsequent publication of her early novels. It will explore her relationship with her publishers and will also, as a postscript, consider the role of the recent republication of her fiction by Michael Walmer in a possible reclamation and re-examination of Benson’s work in the twenty first century.

‘The violent destruction of solid things’: Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime short stories

Elizabeth Bowen’s introduction to the American edition of The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1944) explores the feeling of ‘lucid abnormality’felt by many during the Second World War; in this collection of short stories, Bowen offers a portrayal of London life when ‘[t]he violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. This paper focuses on three specific stories from the collection; these stories – ‘The Inherited Clock’ (where time is literally stopped), ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Happy Autumn Fields’ – demonstrate Bowen’s own fascination with temporal discombobulations, depicting in the latter two stories the ‘destruction of solid things’ where time is no longer fixed and where ghosts from the past displace time in order to appear in the present.  Drawing on these stories, this paper discusses Benson’s use of temporal disturbances in her wartime Gothic stories to explore the fears of many in London who did not know ‘who the dead were’ and for whom ‘the destruction of solid things’ leads to a ‘rising tide of hallucination' for those struggling to live in a world torn apart by war

'Peer review of learning and teaching in higher education: international perspectives' by Judyth Sachs and Mitch Parsell : review

Book reviewThis collection of essays, edited by Judyth Sachs and Mitch Parsell, is focused on the research behind, and the practical application of, peer review in higher education. Many of the contributors are engaged with peer review in Australia but there are also essays from academics from the UK, North America and South Africa which add to the international perspective of the study

Introduction

An introduction to the first volume of The Elizabeth Bowen Review (2018

Generation and regeneration: a tale of 'Helen’s Babies'.

Conference papers from 23rd annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP).In 1876 John Habberton published his first novel, Helen's Babies: With Some Account of Their Ways Innocent, Crafty, Angelic, Impish, Witching, and Repulsive, Also, a Partial Record of Their Actions During Ten Days of Their Existence. The novel follows the trials and tribulations of Harry, Helen’s brother, left alone for a fortnight with his two nephews whose behaviour both charms and exhausts him in equal measure. It was a popular adult book from its first edition; however, over the succeeding years the novel has come to be regarded as a children’s book, rather than one for adults, and this transition, this regeneration, provides an interesting component in the history of the publication of children’s fiction. Although Habberton might have believed that the novel ‘had no literary justification for surviving its first summer’,[1] reporting that it was ‘declined by every prominent publishing house in the United States’,[2] George Orwell noted that ‘in its day [the novel was] one of the most popular books in the world–within the British Empire alone it was pirated by twenty different publishing firms, the author receiving a total profit of £40 from a sale of some hundreds of thousands or millions of copies.’[3] Part of its enduring charm may lie in its picture of a past which Orwell describes as ‘not only innocen[t] but [depicting] a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling’’,[4] its popularity possibly enhanced by the 1924 movie adaptation starring the child actor Baby Peggy and Clara Bow.[5] With each edition and revision of the text, a new audience was sought. The regeneration of the text – from adult book to children’s book – is a fascinating story; through an analysis of six different editions of the book which focuses on the materiality of the book, the type and the illustrations, this paper charts that journey of regeneration, as Helen’s Babies became a novel which was firmly at the heart of childhood in the mid twentieth century

Crossing borders: the fantastical world of Stella Benson’s 'Living alone'.

Conference paper from The 16th annual conference of the Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-194

Laughter and dying: Stella Benson's Hope against hope and other stories, and Tobit transplanted

The novels and short stories of Stella Benson (1982-1933) cover a wide range of issues including suffrage, the morality of war and the rights of women through a mixture of realism, fantasy and satire.  Drawing on a range of twentieth and twenty first century theoretical approaches relating to humour and satire this essay considers Benson’s use of humour and satire in her collection of short stories Hope Against Hope and Other Stories (1931) and Tobit Transplanted (1931). Throughout both texts, Benson explores human frailties, inviting the reader to view her characters with an ironic detachment.  This essay argues that this use of comedy highlights the tension between humour and subject matter, and provides an insight into both her life and 1930s society

Book review: 'Posthumanism' by Pramod K. Nayar

Book review - Posthumanism by Pramod K Naya

A world of lost innocence: the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this time she wrote ten novels, over one hundred short stories and countless reviews and journal articles. While earlier novels are now acknowledged as Modernist texts, her later novels can be read through the lens of postmodernism; they can be considered variously as romantic fiction, marriage novels, war time spy thrillers and psychological drama but, throughout her novels, she consistently questioned notions of identity, sexuality and the loss of innocence. A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen offers a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction which focuses specifically on this loss, foregrounding the psychological conflicts experienced by her protagonists. It examines the subject not only across the range of her fiction, but also in relation to her unfolding narrative structures through a chronologically based discussion of her novels and selected short stories, interwoven with biographical information and drawing on unpublished letters. This book investigates the dominant kinds of innocence that Bowen represents throughout her fiction: the innocence attributed to childhood, sexual innocence and sexual morality, and political innocence, and argues that the transition from innocence to experience plays an important role in the epistemological journey faced both by Bowen’s characters and her readers