Beschreibung:

BENSON, Stella (1892-1933). An archive of letters, typescripts, photographs and juvenilia by Stella Benson, together with letters to her from Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis Rebecca West and others. The archive consists of: approximately 77 autograph letters signed and 2 letters signed by Benson to 'James', occasionally 'Shaemas' (her husband, James O'Gorman Anderson), London, New York, California, the Bahamas and elsewhere, February - August [1929], June - July [1931], March - August [1932], together with 28 autograph letters signed, an autograph postcard signed and a letter signed to her brother Roger, her mother-in-law and others, England, China, the USA and elsewhere, 1920-1933, mostly n.d., approximately 550 pages, various sizes (a few letters apparently incomplete); typescripts signed of her novels Tobit Transplanted (with occasional autograph emendations), Pipers and a Dancer (a number of autograph corrections), The Little World (frequent autograph emendations) and Pull Devil, Pull Baker (frequent autograph emendations), together with typescripts, some signed, of a number of articles in two folders; letters to Stella Benson, mostly 1932, including: WOOLF, Virginia (1882-1941), three autograph letters signed, 52 Tavistock Square, London, 1 July - 25 July 1932, inviting her to supper and to stay in Radnell, apologising for not having read Tobit Transplanted as she is 'so drugged with reading novels for the Hogarth Press that I can't bear the sight of them' and asking if she is 'serious in wanting to sell your car', 5 pages, 8vo (letter of 2 July torn, affecting signature); and autograph letters signed by Wyndham Lewis discussing sittings for his portrait of her ('I would have written you before this but I have had a libel action sprung on me over the weekend'), Rebecca West, David Cecil, Vita Sackville-West ('Vita Nicolson'), Nigel Nicolson (letter signed), I.A. Richards, Marie Belloc-Lowndes, Sydney Schiff (6 autograph letters signed and 4 typed letters signed, some as 'Stephen Hudson', his nom-de-plume), E.C. Gilbert (5 autograph letter signed and one typed letter signed) and others (family members, friends, editors, literary admirers), in total approximately 130 letters ; and a collection of autograph and printed juvenilia (11 volumes), seven photograph albums from childhood holidays and from China, more than 30 portrait photographs, a portrait sketch in pencil by Cuthbert Orde, an autograph account book for income from writing, two albums of newspaper cuttings and a diary and retained copies of three letters to R. Ellis Roberts, Stella Benson's biographer, by her husband James Anderson Stella Benson was one of the most notable British novelists of the 1920s and '30s, her characteristic style a combination of 'fantasy with realism and satire with profound pity' (DNB). Her last completed novel, Tobit Transplanted (1931), a relocation of the Apocryphal book to 1920s China, achieved considerable popular success and received the Femina Vie Heureuse prize and the A.C. Benson silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature for 1932. Benson's life was as eccentric as her genius: after a period of social work in Hoxton, and vigorous participation in the suffragette movement of 1914, she left England in 1918 to spend the next two years travelling in California and the Far East, escaping from Chungking amidst incipient civil war, and meeting her future husband, James 'Shaemas' O'Gorman Anderson, an official in the Chinese customs service. She was married in London in 1921 and, in spite of perpetual ill health, spent much of the rest of her life in China. She died of pneumonia in Hongay, Tongking, on 6 December 1933. The bulk of the letters to her husband were written during visits to England and the United States from China, and report on the progress of her novels, on her travels, and on the literary acquaintances that were a part of her increasing recognition, in particular with Virginia Woolf ('very sweet and human')