“Sometimes I pose, but sometimes I pose as posing”: Stella Benson’s early fiction

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’ (I Pose xi). This chapter argues that, in her experimentation and subversions of those older forms, genres, and tropes, Benson writes texts which explore the issues of war, gender, and sexuality in a time which is filled with the horror of hearing “news that tortures in the telling” (Living Alone xi).