WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL:

Part 1: The Diaries of Stella Benson, 1902-1933 from Cambridge University Library

Contents listing

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS OF REELS

NOTES TO THE DIARIES WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

Publisher's Note

“Feminist, travel writer, novelist and story writer, Stella Benson (1892-1933) left a significant – and often irreverent – record of life during the late teens, twenties and early thirties in , the US, and China. Her early experimental psychological fantasies, set in England during World War I, continue to offer insights into the time and the place. Her later more sophisticated works set in China won immediate literary recognition and even now provide an important understanding of the complex cultures of the China Benson knew, one which few other Westerners knew or wrote about. Yet her best writing, as well as her most astute observations on world events during an important part of the twentieth century, is found in her unpublished diaries.”

Professor Marlene Baldwin Davis, Department of English, College of William & Mary, writing in the Literary Encyclopaedia.

“…A great part of her life was spent in places where people make it their business to be sociable – in hotels, on board ship, among groups of expatriates in out-of-the-way corners of the globe – and more often than not Stella was to be found in the thick of the company, talking quietly but with wit, and with intense engagement if that was at all possible, or singing to her guitar, dancing, playing silly games…she met innumerable people, and large numbers of them make their appearance in the diary. She became an expert at the verbal thumbnail sketch – honest in intent, if hasty – which strips a layer or two off the onion of personality.”

Joy Grant, in her Preface to Stella Benson: a biography (Macmillan, London 1987).

Stella Benson was a vibrant writer and author of eight novels including I Pose (1915), Living Alone (1919), Pipers and a Dancer (1924), and Tobit Transplanted (1931), originally published in America as The Far-Away Bride (1930), which won the Fémina-Vie Heureuse prize. Her final and unfinished novel Mundos was published in 1935. She also wrote poems and short stories including The Man Who Missed the Bus (1928), a short story published by itself in a limited edition. Collections of her travel sketches are found in The Little World (1925) based on her honeymoon trip across America, and Worlds within Worlds (1928).

Her diaries are very detailed from 1909 onwards, with much material on her social and literary contacts, forthright opinions on people and events. Early volumes trace her work in the East End of London for the Charity Organisation Society, her involvement in the campaign for women’s suffrage, her shop in Hoxton, and two years in America, much of the time spent in the artistic and bohemian community in the San Francisco-Berkeley area.

The diaries are very rich for 1920-1933: a key period for debates about perceptions of empire, the role of women, and methods of colonial administration. During 1920 Stella Benson was in India with Cornelia Sorabji and was soon immersed in her circle of friends. In April she returned to England. At this point she embarked on an eighteen month adventurous journey to the Far East, worked in a mission school and an American hospital in China, and met “Shaemas” – her future husband in China. They were married in London in 1921. His full name was James Carew O’Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Customs Service. He was appointed as Assistant Commissioner at the Customs Station at Mengtsz, in southern China. As a result Stella Benson spent much of the 1920s and 1930s in China & Hong Kong. She found time to make frequent visits to the UK and US. In the early 1930s she campaigned vigorously against the brutal and abusive system of licensed brothels in Hong Kong.

Her diaries are a good source for accounts of people she met on her travels, colonial life in Hong Kong, the Treaty Ports, her views on China and America, with much detail on political and social issues. Her troubled health and her position as a lonely wife in far-flung places contributed to her enthusiasm for writing. Fairly full entries are made on a regular daily basis, for instance:

Sunday, 29 November 1931 (Add 6800)

“...We drove back again to Hong Kong – James & I had supper at the Club. James had forgotten his pills so I undertook to buy a bottle – a difficult problem late on a Sunday evening. After beating in vain on the doors of all foreign drug stores, I asked the hotel porter who advised me to try the Chinese ones up Queen’s Road. I rather amused myself trying these –

surely the Chinese must be either more precise or more unimaginative than other races – I several times saw for instance a glass cabinet in a shop, full of pill bottles, & said (in English for lack of a common language) Please may I look in here, at the same time twiddling the handle or making other inviting gestures towards the Cabinet. No Chinese assistant ever apparently grasped what I meant – he either shrugged his shoulders or said ‘No spik Inglis’. Similarly my rickshaw coolie, even after he had deposited me at 6 Chinese drugstores, still did not know that I was seeking drug stores. I found the pills at last – discovering an assistant who spoke English (I did not really want an English speaker – I simply wanted someone to listen to me while I spoke the name of the pills – instead of shouting me down by saying No spik Inglis as I opened my lips) ….”

Friends included novelists and fellow writers , Naomi Mitcheson, Rebecca West, Vita Sackville West and the poet Amy Lowell. Following an invitation to take tea with Virginia and Leonard Woolf in Tavistock Square (1925) Stella Benson wrote,

“They seem a rather tremulous but extraordinarily intelligent pair. Both are a little maladifs, somehow. He had some kind of a jerking illness [he suffered from a lifelong tremor of the hands] and she looks terribly strained. She, in a day of mannish short clothes and clipped hair, wears untidy trailings and a large heap of faded hair behind. But she has a curious serenity behind her anxiousness, somehow – the serenity of great understanding – in spite of her rather distracted look I don’t believe the world is so difficult for her as it is for me, because she is bigger and never unnerved by little things like the tea being beastly and what not.

Of course she leads a physically easy life more than I do – she is more nervously fragile – she doesn’t challenge physical difficulties as something drives me on to challenge them. It must be a great ease to leave go and suddenly think – well, I’m not strong enough to do that – I can’t go down to Hoxton, I’m too tired – I can’t go back to Shaemas in China, I’m too ill.

Leonard Woolf looked very sad and physically so disabled that you feel you ought to be very gentle, until he speaks and then you feel that you needn’t be too darn gentle. He is a very gentle person himself and not weakly, doesn’t need any cottonwool buffers.” WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

At a tea party given for her by Ella Hepworth-Dixon (1925) Stella Benson was introduced to H G Wells, and in her diary described him as,

“rather easy to get on with and not the traditional ladykiller at all – rumple-haired and schoolboylike and with a high falsetto voice (which gives him a great start in comedy stuff, as it were) and a very charming eager interest in and appreciation of anything said by a person he is speaking to. He seemed to like me but I daresay this seeming is a habit with him. I dare say he wouldn’t long like an unseducible woman. He asked anxiously whether there was a Mr Stella Benson always at hand.”

There are 42 volumes of diaries plus a few letters, poems and other loose papers. The final volume concludes shortly before her sudden illness in Indo-China in December 1933. She died of pneumonia in the hospital at Baie d’ Along, near Haiphong. Her unfinished novel, Mundus, which she was writing at this time, takes the issues of empire, colonialism and nationalism as its central themes.

The diaries were used in Joy Grant’s Biography of Stella Benson and in Susanna Hoe’s The Private Life of Old Hong Kong.

Editorial Introduction by Professor Marlene Baldwin Davis

Providing glimpses into worlds unknown to their readers, diaries are as diverse and complex as their authors. The forty-one diaries of Stella Benson - feminist, novelist, travel writer and story teller - are a vivid case in point. Benson’s keen observations, her attention to detail, and her intelligent and witty insights into the early decades of the twentieth century paint a fascinating picture of her times.

While Benson was first known as a novelist and travel writer, it is in the diaries that she offers her most astute observations and accomplishes her best writing. Her first three novels, experimental psychological fantasies set in England during WWI, continue to shed light on daily life during this turbulent period. They plumb the interior world of consciousness, often utilizing her own inner voices. Her later, more sophisticated works set in China won her immediate literary recognition. Even now they provide an important understanding of the diverse cultures of the China that Benson knew, one which few other secular Western women experienced or wrote about. Adrift from her own country for years at a time, Benson felt intensely the isolation and loneliness of the life of the ex-patriate, and she also sympathized with the émigré. Her diaries and published works reveal with keen sensitivity the ambiguity of their circumstances.

That Benson is a descendent, on her father’s side, of the sister of diarist Samuel Pepys may or may not have been the key factor in her heritage that destined her to become a diarist herself. While she sometimes jokes in her diaries about this family proclivity, it is more likely that she engaged in this occupation, something that would serve significantly in her development as a writer, simply because at an impressionable age she received a diary as a gift. In fact, Benson began keeping a diary in 1902 when she was ten.

What is known is that from the start, Stella Benson considered her audience when recording her innermost thoughts and feelings. Growing up in a cultured literary family, she perhaps intuited the important causal relationship between artist and audience. An avid book lover from her earliest years, Benson was encouraged by both parents - Caroline (Essex) Cholmondeley, a sister of “New Woman” novelist Mary Cholmondeley, and Ralph Benson, a well educated member of the Shropshire landed gentry - to actively pursue her literary interests. Her first publication in 1902 was a poem awarded “Honorable Mention” by St. Nicholas Magazine and appeared in the magazine’s readers’ section. By 1906 Stella had won the magazine’s highest award in poetry.

While not addressing her readers directly in her apprentice diaries, young Stella clearly engages all of the fundamental concerns of the diarist as she begins to record her life. Regarding the importance of place, she begins her 1904 diary with “Memoranda” in which she carefully elaborates upon the nature and setting of her world and the people who populate it with her. Understanding the importance of preservation, she worries that her diary will have to be destroyed because she has been writing in it when she had chicken pox. Considering the demands of audience, she marks her diary “Not to be Seen”. She makes clear almost from the inception that she is not keeping this record for contemporary society but instead for posterity, a choice corroborated in various later entries. Taking seriously the ritual and rigor of diary-keeping, she makes almost daily entries. Grappling with who should be a diarist, she affirms her right to be one, as she notes in a 1907 entry. When the local vicar states that young girls should not keep diaries, she concludes that he should stick to his business noting, “The diary is going on just the same”. And finally, realizing the limitations inherent in diary writing - almost as if with later critics in mind - she notes in 1908 that while she likes keeping the diary, she also realizes it is a “dreadfully one-sided affaire always, only one person’s point of view being seen”.

At the same time, Stella Benson recognizes the importance the diaries have in her life. For the next twenty-five years her diaries - always carefully written in unpretentious notebooks that travel from continent to continent with her - are indispensable to her career and her well being. They become the primary outlet for her inner most thoughts, for her vivid descriptions of her own and foreign lands, for her reactions to the people, for her insights into world affairs, and for the drafts of her bread-winning journalist articles. Particularly as Benson travelled off the many beaten tracks that her life’s journey would take her, her diaries became her single most constant companion.

Another companion was ill-health, which plagued Benson from birth. The effects of physical frailty were burdensome; ironically, it is quite possible that this burden also developed and heightened her imagination in significant ways. As a child and a young woman, she was unable to attend school or to participate in certain social events. At times she personifies her illnesses and they become real people in her imaginary world. As early as 1907, she writes, “When I say in this diary that I read it very often means I am afraid that I get out a book but not think of it again”. She goes on to wonder if having imaginary friends is normal. These “thought people” were to take on a life and world of their own and to alternately offer pleasure or pain to Stella. They seem to have provided companionship during lonely periods: “I got on with The Secret enormously now Mother is away and I have the evenings to myself. It will be months and months till it is finished though & I do love doing it so”. The more Stella is involved actively and socially, the less she writes about entertaining her “thought people”, but from time to time they return. One of the early critics of women writers of her generation, Joseph A. Collins, a psychiatrist, saw great promise in Benson, placing her beside , Rebecca West, and Katherine Mansfield. The psychological is often present in her fiction, and in her diaries she records in detail complex dreams.

Stella also comments in her diary about what she sees as unfair treatment based upon gender. Her brothers had good educational opportunities. Stella sees what better chances they have, and men generally, and writes that they have a “much better time than a woman too from end to end and more opportunities for getting up the ladder than a woman”. Her views can be seen in her eventual support of suffrage and working for the Movement. They are most obvious in her much later participation in a campaign in Hong Kong to close government-supported brothels, which put the physical desires of men over the slavery involved in obtaining young girls to become prostitutes for the brothels.

In her early diaries Benson reflects on familial relations. In fact, the diaries of these years lament her mother’s protectiveness and their economic worries. When she is fourteen, Stella writes, “Father has gone away from Mother”. In reality, her father has left her and her brothers as well. He drifts in and out of their lives, but they learn to live without him. Thereafter the role the Cholmondeley aunts and uncles play in rearing the Benson children is considerable. Aunt Mary, Stella’s favorite aunt in her childhood, gave Stella her first dog, beginning a love of dogs that remained with her always (one of her most poignant works, “The Japanese Barber’s Wife,” illustrates the role dogs played in Benson’s life). Uncle Regie and his wife gave Stella a place in their country home where Stella was regarded as their “fifth daughter”. However, Stella’s mother bore much of the worry of keeping alive a frail child and her remarks were not always kind.

Treatment for Stella in the Swiss Alps at Arosa, a popular site for people suffering from tuberculosis, was somehow financed. WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

In the eighteen months Stella spent there, she entered a world made famous by Thomas Mann, and recorded the good and the bad. The good was in her own maturation and the realization that she could survive without family supervision, although her mother or some relative was with her throughout most of her stay. She also learned to enjoy social life more. The outdoor activities of skating and tobogganing - even if it meant only watching - were thrilling to her. She became proficient in French and German and took Italian lessons. Even though the atmosphere was charged with the ill-fate of tuberculosis and the people she knew and liked sometimes met an early death, Stella regarded this period as a happy time. The bad side was that each doctor she saw predicted grim news for her - deafness, T.B., early death. In spite of their prognoses, Stella was determined to see more of the world before it slipped away from her. It was while at Arosa that Stella first saw photographs of China and when she learns of her father’s death when she is 18.

In 1914 before WWI is declared, a short winter interlude in Jamaica with her mother provides the necessary space to write her first novel, I Pose (1915). Once back in London during the war years, Benson’s diaries are filled with signs of the war and how people are reacting to it. Stella helps poor, working women in the East End and expands her life experiences at the same time. She philosophizes about the war when she writes that she “… mourned violently for the pain there is in the world these days. And for the incredible sin of several million paid to inflict these things upon each other”. Sad as she was about the war, it was a productive time for her personally: she worked for the suffrage cause, served as a gardener in the country (the official Women’s Land Army had not yet been established), became engaged and unengaged, gained confidence, and wrote. By 1919 she had published three novels.

Her diaries from late 1918 to late 1919 describe another new world for Stella Benson who in the process becomes a new Stella. She travels to America where she has contacts, thanks to suffrage and publishing. After a short period in New England, she finds a place in a bohemian community in the San Francisco area. The group, mainly artists, professors, writers, and actors, included the poet and the photographer Ansel Adams. In this milieu Stella found considerable material for two of her future books, Poor Man (1922) and Good Bye, Stranger (1926). These works offer astute, and predominately negative, observations of Americans and American life. Both in fiction and non-fiction, and certainly in her diaries, Stella is often painfully truthful about others and herself, including the racial prejudices she held. Her first visit to California was severely hampered by her serious bouts of illnesses which were not helped by the roaring twenties life-style she enjoyed. Hospitalized, she had to depend on new friends to help her. While for the most part their generosity was considerable; her spirits were so low that “considerable” did not seem “enough”. Yet a few of the friendships she formed during this period were to remain important to her. One person in particular, Albert Bender, while initially upset by her treatment of his country and countrymen, became a devoted friend who corresponded frequently, sent books, periodicals and dried fruits to her even in the worst conditions of civil war in China and who entertained her whenever she returned to San Francisco. She in return wrote often and sent him the transcript of her prize-winning novel, Tolbit Transplanted.

Stella Benson’s desire to see China came true late in 1919. She would spend many of the remaining years of her life in this faraway country, recording details about dress and living that were basically unknown to Westerners, as well as people and places. Again her spirit of adventure and pluckiness helped her in Peking to find temporary jobs and make friends, while saving time to write. After a harrowing trip up the Yangtze, she met and fell in love with her future husband, James Carew O’Gorman Anderson, an engaging Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) stationed in Kungking. Her accounts describe heartrending fighting between the weary Szechwan and Yunnan soldiers and the firing at her ship as it was leaving the Kungking area. These vignettes later appeared in both London periodicals and in her first travel collection, Little World (1925), which Robert Graves reviewed favorably. This use of the diary as draft for both letters and articles was to become a frequent pattern.

Always interested in world events, Stella was following India’s struggle for Home Rule. Comments about it and the events in Ireland appear throughout some of the diaries. It is not surprising that Stella seized the opportunity to visit India and her long-time family friend, Cornelia Sorabji, Oxford educated barrister and social reformer. With Sorabji’s connections, Stella was able to interview Gandhi (even though he thought that S. Benson was going to be a man). During her days of seeing the last vestiges of the Raj, she met a remarkable young historian, Eileen Power, the first woman to have been awarded the Kahn Travel Fellowship. Their friendship was to become a lasting one partly because of a mutual friend, sinologist Sir Reginald F Johnston, commonly known as tutor to the last emperor (P’u-i), and partly because of a friendship with Eileen Power’s best friend, social activist Margery Spring Rice.

Once back in London, Benson’s diaries become very personal and dwell on the uncertainties of her engagement and eventual marriage on 9 September 1921 to James Anderson, who is on home leave from China. During a honeymoon year in the United States, they drive across country to California, Stella’s American home. While she adjusted quickly, retaining her love-hate relationship with America, life in California was difficult for James, who was glad when they returned to China by way of Europe.

Thus began Stella’s struggle of being a professional woman in a male-oriented colonial society. Her diaries reflect the isolated life in the Treaty Ports in which she confronts the construction of “colonial wife”. Stella neither accepted women’s mirroring role, as described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929), nor the very nature of this hierarchical system. In her inversion of this typical colonial marriage arrangement, Benson was part of the second wave of “New Woman” who sought a career outside of the home and out of the country as well. While James, a skilled linguist and by this time an old China hand, enjoyed his work, he led a different life in Mengtze than Stella did. Anderson took considerable interest in his wife’s work, but he, like most husbands of his era and place, put his own work first. More than once he had to combat criticism of his wife’s candid articles about her fellow countrymen abroad, especially in their Hong Kong years. This divide contributed to their already complicated marital relationship. Stella acknowledges many times in the diaries her limitations in physical relationships and her husband’s need for them. Although they both wanted children, it did not seem possible. Being childless in the Treaty Port environments of Mengtze, Lun Ching Tsun, Nanning, and Pakhoi, where both missionaries and fellow CCS families of various nationalities lived close by, heightened her sense of inadequacy.

The diaries indicate the anticipation of the mails, which often did not arrive as a result of the political chaos or weather conditions. Letters, reviews, proofs, books, periodicals, and contracts all came by the same method. Stella depended on all of these deliveries. She writes, “England is my centre” and she needs to have its news. She wanted to stay in touch with family and old friends. Professionally she was separated by physical distance from fellow writers - particularly those who were establishing new literary techniques like Virginia Woolf, for whom Benson had great admiration and a certain amount of fear. She refers to Woolf and Eileen Power as being the most intelligent women she knows and laments her own inadequate education. Yet, neither Woolf nor Power saw this so-called deficiency in Benson. Benson corresponded with many fellow writers and intellectuals, including Woolf. “Time and Tide” editor and novelist Winifred Holtby was a loyal friend as were Naomi Mitcheson, Stephen Hudson, Dominick and Margery Spring Rice. Their letters often alluded to tantalizing bits of literary gossip, such as Spring Rice’s description of a dinner party where William Butler Yeats expounded on the merits of T.S. WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

Eliot or Virginia Woolf’s sympathetic comments about ex-patriate life in Hong Kong.

Diaries during home visits were filled with an active social life. The summer of 1925 while on holiday in France with a literary group (she notes in her diary, “six typewriters at work”), Naomi Mitcheson and her brother J.B.S. (Jack) Haldane were present. It was Haldane who encouraged her to leave her diaries to the University of Cambridge, which he understood was interested in acquiring contemporary diaries. She questions whether anyone would want to read what she has been writing , which has been necessary for her own self-encouragement “to set a record of my contact with people … I have to place on record the fact that I was human and that even I had my human adventures”. After considerable self-doubt, Stella agreed to Haldane’s proposal. However, in the spring of 1933, she contacted the University only to find out that no arrangements had been made to accept her diaries. She was relieved when news came that the diaries would be accepted and kept sealed for fifty years after her death.

After each of the home visits, Benson returned to China or Hong Kong. The last trip in 1932 must have been the most difficult. She had been in the United States and England for six months during which she had been awarded the Femina-Vie Heureuse and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature for her accomplished novel, Tobit Transplanted. Besides enjoying being with family, old and new friends, and being feted in literary circles, she had settled on a house in London and looked forward to living in it. However, she was drawn back to China as James needed her. They had endured much together, and he had been posted to another remote area relatively near Indochina. It was a region known for its humidity and dampness and its beauty. Upon arrival her health deteriorated dramatically. James was able to change his location to a slightly better nearby area, Paktoi. Feeling somewhat better (yet she did dream of death), she and James travelled to Bali in the summer. Her diaries for this period are rich in details about Bali and its people. Finally she accompanied James to Tonkin. On this last trip she contracted fatal pneumonia. Her last entry on 28 November ended with “I fell into bed”.

On 6 December 1933 Stella Benson died in a French hospital in Indochina. James buried her the next day in a small graveyard on one of the little islands in the Baie d’ Along. Defying medical prognoses or at least postponing them, Benson had accomplished her lifelong goals: to write and to explore. What Stella Benson left readers in her diaries alone reveals fragments of the life and times of a woman who grew up and out of a post-Victorian world into modernity.

Contents of Reels

CONTENTS OF REELS

Diaries

REEL 1

Add 6762 1902 Add 6763 1903 Add 6764 1904-1905 Add 6765 1906

REEL 2

Add 6766 1907 Add 6767 1908 Add 6768 1909

REEL 3

Add 6769 1910 Add 6770 1911 Add 6771 1912

REEL 4

Add 6772 1913 Add 6773 1914 Add 6774 1915

REEL 5

Add 6775 1916 Add 6776 1917 Add 6777 January – July 1918 Add 6778 July – December 1918

REEL 6

Add 6779 January – May 1919 Add 6780 May 1919 – March 1920 Add 6781 March – June 1920 Add 6782 June – September 1920 Add 6783 September – December 1920 Add 6784 January – April 1921 Add 6785 April – October 1921

REEL 7

Add 6786 October 1921 – March 1922 Add 6787 March – July 1922 Add 6788 July – October 1922 Add 6789 October 1922 – May 1923 Add 6790 May – October 1923 Add 6791 October 1923 – December 1924 Add 6792 December 1924 – October 1925

REEL 8

Add 6793 October 1925 – July 1926 Add 6794 August 1926 – February 1927 Add 6795 February – October 1927 Add 6796 October 1927 – July 1928 Add 6797 July – December 1928 Add 6798 December 1928 – August 1930

REEL 9

Add 6799 August 1930- July 1931 Add 6800 July 1931 – April 1932 Add 6801 April 1932 – July 1933

REEL 10

Add 6802 July – December 1933 Add 6803 Poems and Juvenilia Add 8367 Letters and other loose papers WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

Notes to the Diaries by Professor Marlene Baldwin Davis

REEL 1: Add 6762-6765. 1902-1906

Like many other ten-year-old children, Stella Benson filled her first diaries with the details that recreated her personal world. She and her family no longer lived in their country house, Lutwyche Hall in Shropshire. London was home. There was Father, Mother, her older brother George and her younger brother Stephen. Also an intimate part of the family was her mother’s family, the Cholmondeleys - father, sisters and brothers and cousins, and to a lesser degree the Benson family. Whether her Aunt Mary Cholmondeley, author of the controversial novel Red Pottage (1899), sensed her young niece’s ability to read with understanding, she certainly saw Stella question the ways of the world and kept Stella supplied with a generous supply of books and gave her her first dog, beginning a life-long love of dogs. Stella in turn declared Aunt Mary to be her favorite aunt. A close friend of the Cholmondeley sisters, Cornelia Sorabji was a Calcutta barrister who read law at Oxford and dedicated her life to social issues, particularly relating to gender. Sorabji entered Stella’s life in 1903 and remained a friend throughout Stella’s life.

Always interested in what was happening in the nation and world, Stella notes getting tickets for the Coronation (postponed and re-scheduled for 9 August 1902). She refers to the San Francisco and Valparaiso earthquakes.

Stella lists what she is reading or being read to and among fiction writers has favorites - Jane Austin, Dickens, Kipling, Stevenson and others. She’s also contributing poetry and drawings to the readers’s section of St Nicholas Magazine, an important venue for young readers and writers, and won the magazine’s top poetry prize in 1906.

From the beginning of Stella’s life, her health was precarious. Owing to her frailty, she was often kept away from possible infections and spent time alone or at least without the close companionship of other children.

At the end of this period Stella notes “Father left Mother”; a divorce did not occur, and Stella’s father drifted in and out of the life of his family until his death in 1909.

REEL 2: Add 6766-6768, 1907-1909

During her mid-teen years, Stella continues her interest in writing poetry (9 Jan, 2 Mar, and 7 Aug), reading widely and developing her imagination. For the first time in her diary she mentions the “thought people” (7 June ’07). This imaginary world would continue to play a role in her life for years to come and perhaps be the source of her keen interest in psychology.

Suffrage was in the air and at home. The Cholmondeley sisters and their friends supported this cause. At first Stella made fun of the way the suffragettes behaved, but she always supported their goals. She remained a feminist throughout her life. As she mused over the opportunities for the different genders, Benson wished that she was a male. It was clear to her that a man has more interesting choices and “a better time than a woman”. (17 Sept. ’07).

Stella liked board games and cards and early on developed skills in chess, backgammon, bridge and finally poker. The latter two were an important part of colonial life in China and Hong Kong. Stella liked to gamble in both cards and life.

The subject of diary-writing itself interested Stella. Even though she realized the contents are “one-sided”, she became more attached to her daily companion.

Awareness of the increasing political tensions in Europe begins to enter her diaries, as does Stella’s social awareness of the role class plays in one’s life (20 Dec.’08). She sees this difference in her immediate family’s daily life in Fleet, a London suburb, and that of her Cholmondeley cousins who live in a country house, Preshaw, and have an active social life. Both the house and grounds at Preshaw and her connections there are to have a lasting importance to Stella.

Stella began the new year writing admiringly about Kipling. She says “Kipling makes his villains and heroes in one”. (1 Jan ’09). Trying to make the best of a dreary situation in Fleet, Stella relies on as many interests as possible. She buys a phonograph which all the family enjoy. Yet, when listening to music on the phonograph, Stella is aware of her thought people who seem to take over (6 Aug.’09).

These lonely periods do not keep Stella from keeping in touch with world events. She notes the excitement and controversy of Commander Peary’s reaching the North Pole (7 Sept ’09).

In September Stella’s luck seems to turn. She is allowed to join a small group of young women her age to study in Freiburg, Germany under the supervision of Mrs. Denne, a friend of her Aunt Margaret’s. It is impossible to undervalue the significance of this time with her contemporaries. She loves it (many entries in September and most of October ’09). By late October, however, her health has deteriorated, and she and Mrs. Denne travel to Basel, to meet Mrs. Benson. Stella writes that she “simply howled with crying.” The thought of being deprived of a normal relationship with friends her age was too much to cope with: “I can’t bear going back to live alone with Mother as always and all the thought people will come trooping back and why can’t I stay where I am happy. Why does God wish me to be alone and sad” (25 Oct. ’09).

Arosa, a well-known area for tubercular treatments and cures, is the Swiss destination of Stella and her mother. For the majority of the next eighteen months this general region will be Stella’s home. While the atmosphere of this extraordinarily beautiful natural environment becomes routine, Stella writes at the end of December that her year has presented her great joys - she has “seen Holland, seen the Rhine and its castles, lived in the Schwartzwald, and ended up in one of the loveliest spots in Switzerland…” and also she has come to appreciate “…for the moment tiny pleasures which one cannot take into account when looking forward” (30 Dec ’09).

REEL 3: Add 6769-6771, 1910-1912

On her eighteenth birthday on 6 January Stella, feeling a little sorry for herself, notes that “…I have seldom had a duller WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

birthday.” The events of the day included what must have been typical of the social side of a day at Arosa - tea, roasting chestnuts, bobsleigh racing. With the latter Stella was an observer not a participant. New friends remembered her birthday and the next day she is taken with another young woman on a sleigh ride and feels “like a Russian princess with the bells jingling all round me and the man whooping to make the horse go faster”. The entries of this period include thoughts about gender, class, and nationalities.

Conscious of an eventual audience for her diary, in early March Stella notes that “It is no good keeping my diary very often now. I do so much and so many details would be necessary that it wouldn’t be interesting.” She is also determined to carry through writing a book (5 Apr). Stella was also being given lessons in how to play the guitar by a fellow resident. This skill was to bring much pleasure to Stella in the future. She also enjoyed seeing photographs of China taken by another resident “which make me pine to go there…” (15 Apr). Another seed has been planted.

Family members come and go, and Mr. Benson even says he will come. Stella writes, “It sounds horrid and I do hope he won’t. For one thing his heart would be bad at this height. But there are other reasons” (21 Apr). She doesn’t explain what the reasons are, but she had every right to worry about his odd behavior. Yet, when her mother asks her if she didn’t realize that her father was an alcoholic, Stella is quite surprised and sympathetic (5 July).

Stella is working on her German with a young woman whom she describes as being “greater fun than I should have thought possible for a German” (3 May). Common - and sometimes derogatory - stereotypes are throughout the diaries, but once written, the individual being described takes on a human and usually appealing side.

News of the death of King Edward comes to Arosa (7 May). A few days later Stella mentions her late sister Catherine and that “she would have been twenty today if she had lived, and I shouldn’t have been the spoilt little brute I am” (10 May). This is not the first entry that showed Stella missed her sister. Her grandfather Chomondeley died in August and Stella thinks about her own death. Illness and death are never far away in the daily entries.

Stella also says of herself that she is a gossip: “It is my nature to tell scandal and make people dislike each other”. Then she adds rather melodramatically, “How can I expect anyone to like me, if I was laid bare in a book I should be worse than any of the people already written of, readers would say I was an incredibly bad character” (17 Aug). Her accounts of her relationships with her doctors and various male patients show Stella’s sexual awareness.

As the year draws on, whispers of war with Germany continue and create uneasiness among the English-speaking community. To Stella 1910 had “been quite a different year from my prophesy but by no means unhappy. Many more happy days than unhappy. I wouldn’t mind living it again” (31 Dec).

Always a benchmark of how she is feeling, Stella’s birthday - her nineteenth - brought this note: “…one of the nicest birthdays I’ve had for a long time.” Her day was filled with activities, which were “fun”. Entries in this period reflect her interest in observing people and how they might appear in literary works, especially if they recognized themselves. She also responds to a church service where she says “I think the book of Isaiah is pure poetry from beginning to end. It dazzles one with the beauty of its imagery, the pathos of its tragedy”, but this delight doesn’t stop her from questioning “failure” (8 Jan).

In April as Stella and her companions begin their way home to England, Stella sees a doctor who advises her to go to Egypt or Lausanne after the summer in England. She is advised to sunbath “with nothing on in the sun upon a mattress with window open and the sky looking on in an unblushing way. It feels indecent and the parts of me which have never before felt the sun have a sort of new surprised feeling” (23 Apr). By late May they have arrived home, which is now Little Glassenbury for Stella and her mother. They like it much better than Fleet.

Stella appreciates that she is healthier than she was earlier in her life. She comments on this improvement after having read some of her old diaries (30 May). She is also happy to be reunited with her dog, Pepper (21 Jun).

On 22 June the new king, George V, is crowned.

Stella’s father is still ailing. One of his old friends Miss Mott from America is coming to visit. Stella’s returning to America is being considered.

In October Stella and her mother set off for Chernex for the winter. They stop in Paris and go to the Louvre where they see the “Venus de Milo”. Before they are settled at Chernex, Stella’s father died on 16 October at Folkestone. A month later Stella reads that one of her friends and admirers at Arosa, Captain Reinhold, died.

The year ends on a down note at another nearby town where her treatment continued. After a series of entries which chronicle her movements, she notes “What a stupid thing a diary must be to a strange eye. At least mine would be meaningless because most of my statements are nothing more than sort of shorthand notes to remind me of pleasant minutes” (12 Dec).

As 1912 began Stella writes that she likes being away from home, “abroad” and that she’s “never homesick.” In February she and her mother joined her uncle Regie and some of the Cholmondeley family and friends in Vernet where they stayed until late April. During this period the Titanic went down and Stella, like most people, reacted to the tragedy (18 Apr). In May Stella, her younger brother Stephen and their mother were back in Little Glassenbury. A personal tragedy begins for Stella, deafness. This condition will increase with time.

Friends and acquaintances her age are marrying and Stella worried about being “an old maid” (12 June). She thinks about journalism as a career as second best (30 June) and even applies for a job as a correspondent, which she doesn’t get (25 July). Earlier in July she attends the cricket matches at Lords and gets lectured on class by the aunts. She is eager to be with people and not by herself as the thought people return then.

At the end of October Stella and her mother are back at Montreux and engage in various activities with fellow residents. In late December Stella learns that one of her friends, a young Bulgarian woman, has died. Her death makes Stella think about her own vulnerability (29 Dec). WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

REEL 4: Add 6772-6774, 1913-1915

War and its effects concern Stella during these years. Her detailed entries describing how people of various classes felt and lived provide vivid glimpses of the refugees from Belgium, financial problems, black outs (9-11 Sept.’14) and government supervision (16 Nov.’14). Patriotism and public mindedness prevail yet the suffragettes continue to be attacked and demeaned (11 and 19 June ’14).

Stella and her mother began the year in Mandeville, Jamaica where the climate was to help Stella get through the winter. There was plenty of little sight-seeing trips, bridge, and minor socializing. Once back in England, the various aunts talk to Stella about her future and her relationship with her mother (20 Apr ’14). It is time for Stella to be more independent. She moves into the Rodney Club where she has a room (2 May ’14). One of the first events she takes in is “the Cinematograph pictures of Scott’s Polar Expedition” which she describes and thinks about in detail (7 May ’14).

Being part of London during these tragic and dramatic times opened Stella’s eyes and mind. The entries of this period are not short of strong views and philosophical positions. For the first time she lives independently, becomes engaged and unengaged, and publishes her first novel, I Pose. Yet, some of the entries dwell on loneliness. In January of 1915 Stella moved into a room nearer where she worked in the East End of London. Her childhood and family friend Laura Hutton, who remains loyal to Stella throughout her life, offers Stella physical affection but this kind of relationship is not what Stella is seeking. While holding a cat and sleeping, she dreams she is holding a baby and thinks she “had a real baby at last” (21 May ’15). This longing for a child is to stay with her for years.

On May 7 she notes the sinking of the Lusitania, a tragedy that stunned civilians and made them realize their own vulnerability in the war. On 31 May she describes what happened when the Zeppelin raided London. When she can, she continues to read. Brothers Karamazov draws Stella totally into its world. After she finishes reading it, she says, “I read the diary of my respectable ancestor Samuel Pepys. It occurs to me how finely & triumphantly the Puritans were justified by what came after. How very self-righteous they must have felt sitting in their seclusion & watching their rival slobber Naval money over his mistresses, and hunting a moth “very merrily” while the Dutch were in the Medway” (24 May 1915). Stella is becoming more sophisticated and often finds it difficult to accept her aunts’ views or interests. A novel by Rhoda Broughton, which Aunt Mary recommended as “very witty”, leaves Stella unimpressed. She senses the generational gap (14 July ’15). However, she is physically attracted to and influenced by the ideas of an older man, Mr. Konstam, and refers to him in the diaries as “Older & Wiser”. (many entries).

Stella’s interest in Feminism continues and she notes that Danish women now can vote. Will British women be rewarded for their war work and be next? (8 June ’15). When she mentions the murder of Nurse Cavell, she indicates that it “has made great stir, & I should think has morally advanced the Feminist cause one decided step. But not the recruiting. The sort of man who hasn’t enlisted yet doesn’t mind the murder of women” (23 Oct. ’15). Stella’s own health remains a serious concern and consumption is never far from the lips of her doctors (12 Nov ’15).

“The Birth of the Nation” is being shown to full houses. Stella has to take an afternoon off to finally see it, which she says “is a sensational show & like all sensational shows it sticks in your mind.” Then she discusses the implications of the film and sees it again the next day (19-20 Nov ’15).

More than one entry refers to Gallipoli and losses in the war (15 & 20 Dec. ’15).

REEL 5: Add 6775-6778, 1916-1918

During this period Stella published her second novel, This is the End (1917) and a collection of poems, Twenty (1918), as well as magazine articles.

As always Stella is also responding in detail about what she is reading and seeing: Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd” (3 Feb ’16); re-reading Dickens and Kipling (7-9 June ’16). She’s also reading, enthusiastically this time, another novel by her Aunt Mary’s good friend Rhoda Broughton, New Woman novelist, and “Man and Superman” by Shaw. After seeing Ibsen’s “Ghosts”, she feels “chewed up and spat out”. And she adds, “…I am a little the wiser for it (the play), & certainly have seen something nearer than usual to perfect art” (22 May ’16).

Letters about her own work are welcomed. Rebecca West, successful novelist and free thinker, pleased Stella by writing. Marie Belloc-Lowndes, novelist and sister of the versatile writer, Hilaire Belloc, sent Stella a letter about I Pose. Stella was pleased but says “I don’t think very much of her writing, so I am only mildly gratified and grateful”

(12 Feb ’16). She heard for the first time from an American, Brooks Henderson, who will become a good friend and introduce her to many of his friends, both American and English (24 Sept ’16).

It makes sense that the novel Stella is writing will be titled Living Alone as that is what she was learning to do. Her diaries describe what the war is like for people at home and her own wartime jobs, particularly the gardening (part of a pre-land girl program) and working with “her family” in the East End, especially Mrs. Oneleg. Friends are losing their sons on the front (22 Feb, 4 Mar, and 13 Aug ’16) Even her thought people are fighting. The thought people occur frequently in the 1916 diary entries. In a complex dream about one of them, Conrad, Stella observes a war scene in Russia. After she describes the dream she adds, “Thought people always mean trouble for me, but they are worth it” (21 Mar ’16). She defends the use of secret friends in her writing also (18 May ’16).

The continent is not the only place with unrest. She writes, “Very bad news of a rising in Dublin. Pessimists would call this the crumbling away of a dynasty, and optimists a test of the gift of Empire” (25 Apr ’16). Generally throughout her entries she is sympathetic to Home Rule in Ireland. She also thinks about how German soldiers must be lonely and realize that “their cause” is not shared by the world (8 Sept ’16).

Stella has adopted the young son of one of her contacts in Hoxton in the East End. This relationship is not a traditional adoption where Johnnie lives with her, but she helps support and educate him - to see him through his troubles and grow up. In her own family her father’s sister, Aunt Phyllis, is doing somewhat the same thing for a young cabaret dancer that Stella’s brother George has fallen in love with and later marries. Aunt Phyllis is “to show her (Olive) how people behave & think” (5 WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

May ’16).

War continues to reach ordinary people’s lives. Stella describes her feelings as an explosion at a munitions plant occurs (19- 20 Jan ’17). At the same time her thought people get “worse & worse” and she makes a connection between them and War & Peace, which she has just finished. “It has in the most wonderful way revived the thought people. That book must have been written for me, and it has been waiting for me these fifty years” (11 & 17 Feb ’17). In March she refers to what is happening now in Russia, which she refers to as her “secret country” (16 Mar ’17). This affection for a country which she never will visit remains with her. The reviews for her own book are quite good (15 Apr ’17), yet she has “what we (Stella includes herself in the Hoxton group of women she has worked with) call in Hoxton’ the sinking feeling’” and even thinks about suicide, but not seriously. Stella finds her job working on the land is hard work, but it puts her in touch with nature. She also has the companionship of her secret friends: “Also had nice Secret Friends all day, mostly singing, which I always like” (23 Apr ’17). Later in the year Aunt Mary Cholmondeley introduces Stella to a woman with second sight. Stella is not pleased with their interest and interpretation of her secret friends: “But I become mule like when Aunt Mary & her friends talk of my Secret World. They don’t understand it, they explain it, & I will not myself either understand it or explain it, nor shall any alien theories trespass in it” (9 Dec. ’17).

Brooks Henderson, a reader for Macmillan in New York, visits Stella. She finds him to have “such a nice gentle USA accent, and a USA way of completing every grammatically perfect sentence even to the last full stop…” (27 Sept ’17). In October Brooks introduces Stella to Margery Garrett Jones and Dominick Spring Rice. With her usual wit, Stella assesses their relationship: DSR “(heavenly name) seemed to be a sort of tame cat of hers, or rather say tame terrier, quite an amusing young man, with a startling cynical memory for unexpected things like the thirty-nine articles, & LCC byelaws.” Margery, a young war widow and social activist whose aunts were Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett, was at Girton College (Cambridge) with Eileen Power, who would become an eminent historian. (Stella and Eileen meet in India in 1920). Dominick grew up on the fringes of Bloomsbury and was an editor and economist. Both Margery and Dominick were to become important and life long friends to Stella.

In November of 1917 Stella attends some Fabian Society meetings. George Bernard Shaw speaks and Stella recognizes Mr & Mrs Sidney Webb. During this period Ireland and Russia are both in chaos. Stella’s good friend Captain Allen and Stella talk about what is happening in Ireland. Stella’s position is that “if all England was made up of SBs we should be shot of the cursed island, we should have left it long ago to work out its own damnation. It seems to me so terrible & so heartrending that Ireland herself should have made so appalling a mistake that Easter week, when feeling was running so high towards an honest enquiry & a peaceful settlement” (5 Nov ’17). After the first meeting Stella says of Shaw, “What a marvelous thing to be on the inner side of such an absolutely perfect lens of a brain” (9 Nov ’17). Her opinion varies at different meetings.

Happy to get some journalistic work, Stella is asked to review two books, including Mrs Humphrey Ward by Stephen Gwynne (27 Nov ’17). The last book in 1917 that she devours - “in one delighted gulp” - is E M Forster’s Longest Journey. Later in her career she will meet the talented writer.

On 8 July 1918 Stella begins her travels as a “real girl” (a phrase Benson often uses), sailing from Liverpool to New York. After brief stays in New York, New England, and Philadelphia - during which she bravely volunteered at a hospital during the raging 1918 flu epidemic - Stella left for California.

REEL 6: Add 6779-6785, Jan 1919-Oct 1921

By the time Stella arrived in California, she had written her third novel, Living Alone (1919), a fantasy based upon her own experiences during WWI. This new world was going to be exactly that for Stella. Bertha Pope, a woman who had befriended her in New England, drew Stella into her bohemian world. She met Albert Bender, an émigré from Dublin who developed a successful insurance business in San Francisco and became a patron of the arts and artists - Stella included. Poet and teacher, Witter (Hal) Bynner shared her interests and companionship. He brought his friends and students into her life, including poet Donald Clark and student Clink Greenwood. Providing a more traditional life were Chauncey and Henrietta Goodrich, and the Tolmans, a professor of economics at Berkeley and his wife. She also meets the sister of a former classmate, Doris Estcourt, now living in San Francisco with her family. Life in the Bay area had its ups and downs - serious bouts in the hospital, stints in various jobs, breathtaking trips into the mountains, participation in a poetry club, lively parties, excessive drinking and mainly living a life without restrictions for the first time. But it could not go on forever. Late in 1919 Stella set out for China with material in her diary for her fourth novel.

Stella and her traveling companion enjoyed their shipboard life. Stella was soon taken under wing by the father of Denton Welch. A mild romance occurred, but under Stella’s direction, it remained mild. Later in China Welch and his wife, a devout Christian Scientist, were very kind and caring to Stella.

In Peking Stella looked for a job to support herself and ended up teaching schoolboys. Again through letters of introduction and acquaintances of people at home, she enjoyed an active social life. Harold and Florence Harding, a diplomat and his wife, included Stella in their group. Like many other Westerners they lived in a temple in the Western Hills and often entertained Stella there. During this time Stella met Reginald F Johnston, known foremost for being the English tutor to the last emperor of China, P’u-i. Sir Reginald, as he was later known, probably understood traditional China better than any other Westerner in China. He and Stella became life long friends. It was not unusual for Florence Harding to invite Stella and another friend to accompany her on a trip up the Yangtze. On this exciting trip Stella began reporting on the wars engulfing China. She published many essays in periodicals and some are included in A Little World. Often her diaries served as drafts for these essays and her letters.

A major event in Stella’s life occurred at this stage. She met and fell in love with her husband-to-be, James Carew O’Gorman Anderson, an able career officer in the Chinese Customs Service (CCS), later known as the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS). When they met, James was actually in love with Florence who was unwilling to divorce her husband, but was unwilling to give him up (who at this stage of the diaries refers to himself as “Shaemas” to avoid confusion with another James Anderson). Obviously, the entries of this period focus on the relationships but not at the expense of forgetting about China. The September and October entries are rich in their descriptions of the landscape and the people.

In November Stella joined Cornelia Sorabji in Calcutta just months after the terrible massacre in Amritsar. Cornelia made sure that Stella saw her beautiful and complex country. Illness interrupted part of her visit and cut short her stay. She managed to interview Mahatma Gandhi (Reel 10 has a copy of her notes from the interview) and to meet Eileen Power, the WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

first woman recipient of the Kahn Scholarship.

Once back in England Stella sees old friends and enjoys being in London, settling into an active social life. Her friends Peggy and Edward Boulenger introduce her to the American poet HD (Hilda Doolittle) and her companion Briar (Bryher) Ellermann. Stella wasn’t happy about the evening as she and HD “hardly exchanged two words”, but her praise of HD’s poetry is high: “I personally place her first among modern American poets… (9 Jul ’21). Stella sees a good deal of the Spring Rices and their literary friends and acquaintances.

By summer James Anderson is on home leave and determined to marry her. Stella meets his family in Ireland and doesn’t quite fit the image that Lady Anderson has for her son’s bride. Their relationship remains one of misunderstandings filled with tensions for both of them; however, James’s sister and Stella become friends.

Stella and James marry on 21 September in London.

REEL 7: Add 6786-6792, Oct 1921-Oct 1925

This period includes both rich and diverse entries in the diaries. Stella’s personal life is now that of novelist and colonial wife. As a writer this period is prolific. Her journalistic outpouring is considerable and so is what she regarded as her serious writing. Her fourth novel, The Poor Man (1922), reflects her views on the shallowness of American culture. Two years later in 1924 her fifth novel Pipers and a Dancer was published. Before 1925 ended she had also published The Awakening, a fantasy.

After crossing the United States on a honeymoon trip in a classic road trip with endless car and communication problems, Stella and James arrived in California in January to stay first with the Goodriches before looking for jobs and an apartment. Stella also had to mend fences as a result of The Poor Man, which clearly drew from the old crowd. Her genuine friendships endured and others disappeared.

In May 1922 James and Stella headed for Ireland and England before arriving in China for James’s next post, Mengtsz. James was glad to move to his new assignment in Mengtze in Yunnan Province on the Indochina border. This new life for Stella was a shock. It was the beginning of intense loneliness, amazing experiences, and a complex marriage. Correspondence, trips home, and her diaries were to become her salvation. In daily life she relied on James for companionship. Her fellow female Westerners, missionaries and wives of missionaries, had little intellectual interests and very focused horizons. As an agnostic Stella did not share much with them. Chinese warlords and their activities kept James involved in his career. Stella’s entries of this period describe the landscape, the people, and the tragedy of lawlessness. By spring of 1925 James is posted to Shanghai.

REEL 8: Add 6793-6798, Oct 1925-Aug 1930

In July of 1925 James and Stella go to Lung Ching Tsun, Kirin Province, Manchuria (or the Northeast, as it also known). This remote post, across from Vladivostok, is where Stella was inspired to write her most important novel, Tolbit Transplanted (1931) (or The Faraway Bride, its American title). Deeply sympathetic to the plight of émigrés, Stella drew on this world of displaced Russians to create a witty yet compassionate story of their survival.

During these years Stella also spent time with old friends and met new ones in California, particularly a lively young poet, Marie Welch, a friend of Albert Bender. Through her friendship with Marie, Stella met Harriet and Ellis Roberts in England. Roberts, an editor for The Nation, eventually wrote the first biography of Stella Benson.

During Stella’s visit to California James asked her if he could take a mistress - something many Western men in China did, without asking permission - and she reluctantly agreed. In 1927 both Stella and James are in Europe, particularly London and Ireland for James’s home leave. Besides visiting their families, they saw a good deal of the Spring Rices and Naomi and Dick Mitcheson and their family and became involved in the two couples’ marital problems. Mitcheson, a prolific writer herself, admired Stella and her work. Winifred Holtby, another close friend, fellow novelist and first biographer of Virginia Woolf, travelled to Ireland with James and Stella and saw them frequently. They were not fond of Winifred’s good friend , who gained popularity with her autobiographical book, Testament of Youth. Stella began a friendship with Virginia and Leonard Woolf and was invited to their home (11 Dec ’28). James did not fit in with many of the literary crowd, except for Holtby. Together James and Stella made friends with painter Lady Eileen, a daughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington, and her husband artist Cuthbert Orde. They spent considerable time together, among other things playing poker. Cuthbert also painted Stella. Eileen Power introduced them to her friends as well (many entries). Through literary events Stella met novelists Elizabeth Bowen and Violet Hunt, poet Humbert Wolfe, and many other writers and critics. She also met a dashing man and became infatuated with him. Her diary entries go into detail about her interest and her short-sightedness.

James and Stella have considerable doubts about their own marriage - each blaming the other and then themselves. The late 1928 and early 1929 entries examine these concerns in depth. James went to Ireland while Stella went to the Bahamas to visit her brother George and his wife (16 Feb-11 Mar). She returned to England through New York where she met with Hal Bynner, who was always very kind to her, and his companion, Floyd Neal (21 Mar ).

Once in London again, her engagement calendar was full. Stella meets Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson at the Ordes. C.K. Ogden, linguistic psychologist, was also a guest. They enjoyed talking, especially after the others left. Stella calls Ogden a “scientific Gertrude Stein” which he denies. He promises to introduce Stella to the famous explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson (2 May). Dominick Spring Rice and Stella did go to Ogden’s rooms to meet Stefansson and liked him. Eileen Power was also present (9 May).

James received his next CCS assignment to Nanning in Kwangsie Province in the spring of 1929 (This is the same year that Deng Xian-Ping returns to China from France). The toing and froing of the Chinese generals and their men made daily life for Westerners like Stella and James uneasy. By early December they were anticipating having to flee at any moment. She notes “I have almost nothing I value here - except the typescript of Tobit - and these diaries”. (21 Dec. ’29) The poverty and hunger of the soldiers, as well as their lawlessness, created an atmosphere of uneasiness among the local Chinese who knew they could be the next victims. Yet somehow Stella and James enjoy frequent rides on their ponies and the companionship of their dogs. WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL: THE DIARIES OF STELLA BENSON, 1902-1933

In February, March and April of 1930 there are considerable references to the war and in particular Nanning. While Stella made light of the personal dangers, she does fear being involved in the chaos of the war.

Stella accepted an invitation to visit Sir Reginald F Johnston at Wei-hai-wei, where she works on her next book (June 1930).

Incredibly, these adverse conditions do not keep Stella from writing. She published Little World (1925), a collection of previously published essays including two of her best essays on her trip up the Yangtze in 1920; her novel, Goodbye Strangers (1926); Worlds within Worlds (1928), another collection of previously published essays; a short work, The Man who missed the Bus (1928); and finally in 1929 she finished writing her prize-winning novel, Tobit Transplanted (1931). In appreciation for his many kindnesses Stella sent the typed transcript to Albert Bender in San Francisco.

REEL 9: Add 6799-6801, Aug 1930-Jul 1933

The remaining vestiges of the colonial world still existed in Hong Kong, the next posting for James and Stella. Politically they were much safer here than when they were at remote treaty ports, but socially they both found life stilted. The diaries are filled with appointments for tiffin, tea, tennis, dinner, polo, bridge, poker, receptions, and launch and temple picnics. Sometimes there were as many as three or four engagements daily. For the most part these events are command performances and Stella did not feel real friendship. What does consume her interest and energy was working with a small group of women, particularly Mrs Gladys Forster, to close the government-supported brothels which involved child slavery. This project, which gained the support of Dame Rachel Crowdy of a relevant section of the League of Nations,and Stella’s own writing often ruffled the feathers of many of her patriotic countrymen and the government officials. One article in The Radio Times on the colonial’s obsession with games drew public criticism and tested the tolerance of her husband’s superiors. Even her long-time friend sinologist Sir Reginald F. Johnston scolded her for her lack of discretion. Both Stella and James liked Johnston but also recognized his difficulty in grasping the changes taking place in China. He spent time with them in Hong Kong in early December 1931. Even though his aloof behavior often hurt Stella, she realized that in some ways they were similar (3 Dec ’31). Johnston had gone through difficult years trying to help his former student who in the autumn of 1931 became emperor of the puppet state set up by the Japanese in Manchuria. This same year the revolutionary Chinese novelist Ba Jin (Li Yaotang) (1904- ) published his important novel Jia (Family).

As much as some people viewed Stella as doing nothing (being a writer did not hold much weight) in Hong Kong, as an act of kindness she helped an elderly ex-patriate Russian who was penniless and ill. This relationship, which began 13 April 1931, involved Stella’s listening to the man’s “loving stories”, transcribing them into readable, but not literary English so as not to spoil the effect, and getting them published under the title, Pull Devil, Pull Baker (1931). She describes her meetings and efforts to help Count de Toulouse Lantree Savine, a self-designated former “czar of Bulgaria,” and enigmatic “rogue”, which are both fascinating and exhausting. Ironically the book, which Stella calls a “non-book”, was successful in America and became a Book-of-the-Month selection. Her accounts, both in the diaries and in the book, of her experiences with the Count are a story within the story.

The New Year, 1932, brought Stella Benson the most significant literary recognition of her career. In March on her way home to England by way of the United States, she learned that she had been awarded the Femina-Vie Heureuse and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Virginia Woolf, whom Stella admired greatly had won the Femina in 1928 when Stella had also been on the short list. After stopping in California, Stella visited poet Donald Clark and his companion in New Mexico. Stella and Clark suffered from similar illnesses, with periods of hospitalization. While they did not know each other well, they had corresponded over the years. Once in England, Stella’s diary entries the weeks before and during the award ceremonies and celebrations read like a literary Who’s Who. Old friends and acquaintances like Winifred Holtby, Stephen Hudson, Dominick and Margery Spring Rice, Eileen Power, Rose Macaulay, Naomi Mitcheson, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, Harriet and Ellis Roberts, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, May Sinclair, Laura Hutton and many others share the pages. Stella also wrote more for Time and Tide, Lady Rhondda’s literary journal, which Winifred Holtby was editing.

In April of 1932, James was transferred to Hainan, an island at the upper tip of Indo-China. When Stella arrived after spending six months in American and Europe, the damp and humid climate was too much for her. James was able to transfer to a slightly more agreeable location, Pakhoi, her last residence.

REEL 10: Add 6802-Jul-Dec 1933; Add 6803 poems and Juvenilia; Add 8367 letters and other loose papers.

In late July Stella and James and a friend visited the Dutch East Indies by way of Manila, which Stella disliked. Her entries on this trip included shipboard discussions and very vivid descriptions of Bali and Java. She was particularly fascinated by the people and the role dance played in their cultures. Some of the entries are several pages long. As strenuous as the conditions of traveling were, Stella would rest briefly and plunge into the next excursion. At the same time she noted that she was working on her final novel, Mundos.

After a short interval in Hong Kong, Stella settled into a period of routine in Pakhoi. As always correspondence was very important to her. Especially important were her letters from Virginia Woolf. In late November she joined James on business when he went to Tonkin (the northern part of what is now ). The entries of this period contain descriptions of talks with a young member of the CMS, Teissier. Stella read some of his favorite authors, including Jean Giraudoux, whom she liked. However, after reading another of Teissier’s favorites, P-J Toulet, she wrote with considerable passion about “…the absence of the woman’s voice”. Stella’s feminism had not diminished over the years and these passages offer evidence of her feelings. She did not feel terribly well during the trip, but her final entries show her undaunted enthusiasm for observing her surroundings (26-28 Nov).

The final note in Stella Benson’s diary was written by her husband on 4 December 1934. He began by writing “she died on 6th December 1933, in hospital in the Baie d’Along.” Next he paid tribute to his late wife and affirmed her importance. He also added that he had “not erased or changed one word in the diaries”.