Books by Stella Benson

[Stella Benson (1931)]


from Bronwyn Lloyd's Collection



I Pose (London: Macmillan, 1915)






This is the End (London: Macmillan, 1917)






Twenty (London: Macmillan, 1918)






Living Alone (London: Macmillan, 1919)




The Poor Man (London: Macmillan, 1922)





Pipers and a Dancer (London: Macmillan, 1924)




The Little World (London: Macmillan, 1925)






The Awakening (San Francisco: The Lantern Press, 1925)






Goodbye, Stranger (London: Macmillan, 1926)




(ed.) Come to Eleuthera, or New Lands for Old (N.p. [Bahama?]. n.d. [c.1926?])






Worlds Within Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1928)






The Man Who Missed the Bus (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1928)






Tobit Transplanted (London: Macmillan, 1931)
[first published as The Far-Away Bride (New York: Harper, 1930)]






Hope Against Hope and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1931)






Christmas Formula and Other Stories (London: Jackson, 1932)






Pull Devil, Pull Baker (London: Macmillan, 1933)






Mundos (London: Macmillan, 1935)




Poems (London: Macmillan, 1935)

Robin Hyde & Stella Benson

Robin Hyde

Stella Benson

There’s no question that New Zealand novelist, journalist, travel-writer and poet Robin Hyde (1906-1939) was a great admirer of English novelist, travel-writer and poet Stella Benson (1892-1933). In the following piece, Bronwyn Lloyd suggests that she went a bit beyond admiration, and that her novel Wednesday’s Children (1937) would probably never have come into existence if she hadn’t read Benson’s classic fantasy This is the End (1917).

We've also included a list of books by and about Stella Benson, for any of you who are curious to find out more about her.

brief note

"Your industriousness is a little frightening," says Brett.

Yes, well, I'm just trying to get a lot of things tied away and sorted out before the end of the year. Next year I'm planning to spend a lot more time pursuing my own projects, and a lot less time on editing and bureaucracy generally.

So with that in mind, I've put up a companion to the Poetry Archive website. This one serves a similar indexing function for brief magazine (originally A Brief Description of the Whole World), which I edited between 2002 and 2005.

The longevity of brief is becoming a bit of a phenomenon in itself. It was founded by Alan Loney in December 1995, so with the latest issue, #35 (edited by Brett Cross), it's now reached its twelfth anniversary. (I tried to embed that information in the "profile" page of the new blog, but they informed me that you have to be over thirteen years old to use blogger, so I'll have to wait till next year before fessing up to the magazine's true age.)

I put out a brief index in 2003, shortly after taking over the editorship from John Geraets, and then a short supplementary index in 2005, before handing responsibility for the journal over to Scott Hamilton. So it wasn't all that much trouble to update it, since all that information was still floating around on my computer.

I've put in links to various of the articles which have been reprinted online, notably in the three feature issues - Smithymania (2003), Alan Brunton (2003) and Joanna Margaret Paul (2005) - published as joint ventures with the nzepc, but also to the brief section of the Titus Books website. Other than that, though, the site is really just a big hyperlinked contents list to the issues and authors published by the magazine to date.

Check it out., Hopefully it'll be useful to someone, at any rate.

*

Oh, and by the by, I'm tendering a bit of an apology to the New Zealand Herald. I was extremely scornful about them in my last post, so I was pleasantly surprised when they named Louise Nicholas as their New Zealander of the year for 2007.

I've just been reading her book, and I have to agree that there doesn't seem to be much serious doubt that the cops she describes did indeed regard themselves as above the law when it came to pressuring young girls into having sex with them (for more thoughts on the whole subject of what constitutes "Consent," see Tracey Slaughter's story of that title. It appears as the opening salvo of my "Open House" issue of Landfall.) The sooner that kind of crap goes out the window, the better. Apparently it was more or less up to individual policemen what "moral standards" they wished to apply in such circumstances. Cops have too much power in the community generally not to be subject to the same rules as teachers and doctors in that respect, I think myself.

So good on you, New Zealand Herald. Maybe you're not so subhuman after all. Though I still think you could break an intellectual sweat from time to time without completely alienating your fan-base, I have to admit that the choice of Louise Nicholas runs precisely that risk, so I do think you deserve hearty congratulations on this one.