Living Alone
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy early twentieth-century British fiction and women writers
- Readers interested in fantastical realism and lightly satirical narrative
- Literary readers curious about everyday life and attitudes in Britain during the First World War
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer strong plotting and fast-paced genre fiction
- Readers uninterested in supernatural elements and satire
Reading tips
- Read the opening chapters first to get a feel for the narrative tone, then decide whether to read straight through
- Note the contrast between the lodging house and the wider wartime society, and keep brief notes on characters
- Read alongside Benson's other works or the context of women's writing of the period to understand what her satire targets
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Stella Benson (1892–1933) was a British feminist, novelist, poet and travel writer, born in Shropshire. She lived for a time in California and set several novels in China, often blending fantasy, satire and social observation. Her representative works include I Pose, This Is the End, Living Alone and The Poor Man; the library also holds Twenty and Kwan-yin. In 1932 she won the French Prix Femina for a foreign novel, and she died in Tonkin, northern Vietnam, in 1933. Public information is limited and many details of her life are uncertain, yet her surviving works show a concern with women's lives and cross-cultural experience, written in a witty and imaginative style that gives her a distinctive place in early twentieth-century British literature.
