ABSTRACT
Stella Benson’s first three novels, I Pose (1915), This is the End (1917), and Living Alone (1919), can all be read as experimental texts, ones which utilize elements of realist fiction, fin de siècle proto-feminism, and responses to impending modernity. Benson’s novels offer an alternative, although arguably utopian, view of the future for women, proposing a world of equality where women can, without hindrance or social castigation, live independent lives and, if they so desire, seek their “soul’s remotest/And stillest place”. She is not the first to question a woman’s role in society nor to depart from the conventional marriage plot of earlier, populist fiction; such debates took place in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with George Eliot or George Egerton, for example, explicitly writing about the inequalities inherent in society. In her experimentation and subversions of those older forms, genres, and tropes, this chapter argues that Benson writes texts which explore the issues of war, gender, and sexuality in a time that is filled with the horror of hearing “news that tortures in the telling”.
