Twenty

By Stella Benson

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Twenty" by Stella Benson. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Sep 5, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547215080

Stella Benson

Stella Benson (1892-1933) was an English feminist poet, travel writer, and novelist. Born into a wealthy Shropshire family, Benson was the niece of bestselling novelist Mary Cholmondeley. Educated from a young age, she lived in London, Germany, and Switzerland in her youth, which was marked by her parents’ acrimonious separation. As a young woman in London, she became active in the women’s suffrage movement, which informed her novels This Is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919). In 1918, Benson traveled to the United States, settling in Berkley for a year and joining the local Bohemian community. In 1920, she met her husband in China and began focusing on travel writing with such essay collections and memoirs as The Little World (1925) and World Within Worlds (1928). Benson, whose work was admired by Virginia Woolf, continued publishing novels, stories, and poems until her death from pneumonia in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin.

Book preview

Stella Benson

Twenty

EAN 8596547215080

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

PREFACE

Table of Contents

Almost all the verses in this book have appeared before, the majority of them included in two books, I Pose and This is the End. Messrs. Macmillan, who published these, have been kind in raising no objection to re-publication. I have also to thank the Editors of the Athenæum, Everyman, and the Pall Mall Gazette for allowing me to reprint verses.

The title of the book has no reference to the writer’s age.

S.B.

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CHRISTMAS, 1917

A key no thief can steal, no time can rust;

A faery door, adventurous and golden;

A palace, perfect to our eyes—Ah must

Our eyes be holden?

Has the past died before this present sin?

Has this most cruel age already stonèd

To martyrdom that magic Day, within

Those halls, enthronèd?

No. Through the dancing of the young spring rain,

Through the faint summer, and the autumn’s burning,

Our