WOMEN, WRITING AND TRAVEL

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

“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 England, the US, Hong Kong 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well as her most astute observations on world events during an important part of the twentieth century, is found in her unpublished diaries.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

Stella Benson was a vibrant writer and diarist whose work took her all over America, Hong Kong and China.

Her eight acclaimed novels include I Pose, This is the End, Living Alone and Tobit Transplanted.

We are thrilled to be publishing her complete diaries, 1902-1933. Honest and compelling, Benson’s diaries contain her very 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 especially 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 1920 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 James Carew O’Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Customs Service. They were married in London in 1921.

When he was appointed as Assistant Commissioner at the Customs Station at Mengtsz, in southern China, it meant the couple were to spend much of 1920s and 1930s in China & Hong Kong. Stella 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:

"...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). We had a long talk at the Club with Francis Baxter, about the Petersfield disaster – the court-martial is just over and poor Commander Lang and his young navigator severely reprimanded. The fact that comes out most clearly in the inquiry is that the officers of the Petersfield were in such terror of the choleric and unreasonable Admiral Sir Howard Kelly, that they preferred to run the risk of shipwreck, to disputing the order he had given them – even though the responsibility was Captain Lang’s, - the Admiral was only a passenger. Francis is probably right in saying that no commanding officer should be so much in fear of any superior especially in a
non-commanding position – Francis himself, one feels sure, would have been self reliant and courageous – what he says about Lang having always been a flag officer and therefore having the sense of responsibility atrophied – is also convincing. But even so, nobody has a right to terrify even weak men out of their duty – I can’t help hoping Sir Howard Kelly will get a little splash of the trouble that has washed away the future of the unfortunate lesser officers. Of course my devotion to Sir John Kelly (who has no use for his brother and hasn’t spoken to him for 16 years) prejudices me against Sir Howard.
We came on board a customs cruiser which sails at dawn for Macao, and went to bed there.”
Sunday, 29 November 1931  (Add 6800)

Friends included novelists and fellow writers Winifred Holtby, Naomi Mitcheson, Rebecca West, Vita Sackville West and the poet Amy Lowell.

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 final novel, Mundos, 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.