Stella Benson - The Travelling Life

The Travelling Life

Benson then decided that she wanted to see the world, leaving England for the United States in June 1918. Her first stop was California, and she met many artists and writers in San Francisco and Berkeley, including Witter Bynner and Ansel Adams. Bertha Pope, Albert Bender, and Marie de Laveaga Welch were other lifelong friends she met at this time. She took on a job at The University of California as a tutor, then as an editorial reader for The University Press. These experiences inspired her next work, The Poor Man (1922).

Her next travels, via a return to England in 1920, took her to China, where she worked in a mission school and hospital, and met the man who would be her husband, James (Shaemas) O'Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and later father of Benedict Anderson and Perry Anderson. They married in London the following year. This was a complex relationship, but a very firm one. Benson followed Anderson through various Customs postings including Nanning, Pakhoi, and Hong Kong, even though her writings on China sometimes put her at odds with the Customs Service leadership (Anderson was threatened with dismissal if her writings touched on Customs affairs after one piece in The Nation in October 1927).

They had strong shared intellectual interests. Their honeymoon was spent crossing America in a Ford, and Benson wrote about this in The Little World (1925). They continued to travel throughout the rest of their lives.