ABSTRACT
In May 1914, three months before the outbreak of the First World War, Stella Benson took up independent lodgings in Kensington, London, with the chief aim of becoming 'a working woman'.1 For Benson, born into an upper class family in Shropshire, England, professional work (as for Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby nearly a decade later) represented both the symbol and material means of her emancipation. Nearly a year earlier she had been converted to the Suffrage cause by Emily Wilding Davison's act of martyrdom at the Derby. She devoted herself to work for the Women Writers' Suffrage League and for the United Suffragists, and began her first novel (published the following year), / Pose, claimed by Rebecca West to be 'the only novel of genius about the Suffrage'.2 With this and subsequent novels Benson established herself as a new and modern voice in English literature and her work is now seen to 'bridge the gulf between the documentarist novelists who discussed urgent topical subjects with traditional fictional methods, and the modernists who experimented with new forms of representing private experience and consciousness'.3
