‘Being at home in the world’: Stella Benson’s Goodbye, Stranger (1926)

Despite success later in life, winning the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize in 1932 for her last completed novel, Tobit Transplanted, and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature, and while popular and successful in her lifetime, Stella Benson has never been considered as part of the canon of modernist or early-twentieth-century literature. Drawing on Benson’s unpublished diaries for the period in which she was writing Goodbye, Stranger, this essay, in part, discusses her position outside the canon, but it also explores the world of the changeling and the uncanny, the whimsical and the fantastical in Goodbye, Stranger, those very elements which might be considered the rationale for its exclusion from the canon, but which belie a more serious endeavour: how to find one’s place in a hostile society, when one is a stranger who sits outside of conventional societal and, perhaps, authorial norms.