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

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Peer-review

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Sustainable Development Goals

  • SDG 5 - Gender Equality
    SDG 5 Gender Equality

Abstract

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).

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Peer-review

Host publication Subtitle

Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830-1950

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 190-202 (13 pages)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 28/07/2022

Publication status

Published - 28/07/2022

Place of publication

New York and Abingdon

Publisher

Routledge, United States, United Kingdom

Publication series

  • Publication series name: Among the Victorians and Modernists

ISBN (Print)

9781032043593

ISBN (Electronic)

9781003191629

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/625417
  • Scopus: 85140159709

Host publication title

Re-Reading the Age of Innovation

Host publication editors

  • Louise Kane

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