I\ve come across a remarkable and largely forgotten wrier in Stella Benson {1892-1933}. Her neglect is probably in part owing to her early death at the height of her powers from pneumonia. My introduction is through an early work
, I Pose (1011) centering around two un-named characters--a Gardiner and a militant Suffragette. (Both Stella and her mother were active in women's rights.}
I thought
I Pose was very interesting and iconoclastic mixing a dead serious commitment to its basic theme and a mordant humour that leaps out at nearly every paragraph. The title refers to the fact that people tend to empower themselves and find self-esteem through ideological "poses' they adopt rather than through true self-understanding and interfacing with reality. I gather that she did better in later novels, but this one is by no means insignificant. You won't soon forget her description of the Suffragette March not the ending--with its disturbing modern relevance.
The one down side to the novel is the use of language by her characters describing the natives of the Trinity Islands which nowadays would be considered highly objectionable but which in 1911 would cause less controversy.
All her works are in the public domain.
I Pose is available for a low price from Amazon but it can be downloaded it free from Internet Archive.
There's a great deal about her here:
http://mairangibay.blogspot.ie/2008/...la-benson.html