ABSTRACT
In July 1925, Benson arrived back in England for her first visit home since she left for China with her husband in 1922. It was on this trip that she began to form some significant relationships with other British writers, among them Virginia Woolf with whom she took tea two days after her arrival.1 Benson also met Naomi Mitchison and Winifred Holtby who had both admired her books for a long time and sent 'fanmail' letters to her in China.2 Still at an early stage in their writing careers, Mitchison and Holtby had each published their first novel two years previously, while Benson was author already of five novels and had just completed drafting her sixth.3 As novelists who continued to deploy traditional methods (in historical and documentarist fiction), Mitchison and Holtby were excited by Benson's experiments in more modern forms of narrative and consciousness, while the subjects of Benson's own novels (which include Suffrage, the war, and contemporary China) share with Mitchison and Holtby an interest in 'topical' experience and events. An underlying argument in this chapter is that Benson's work provides a link between 'tradition' and 'experiment', and in her friendships with Mitchison and Holtby inspires a creativity that brings these writers into 'points of contact' with high modernism. Combined, these case-studies newly illuminate women writers' creative and friendship practices, and place Benson, Mitchison and Holtby in relation to contemporary literary communities and cultures.
