Stella Benson's novels capture a view of her time that is both critical and compassionate. She deals with serious issues--people's feelings about woman suffrage, imperial colonization, World War I--but always with imagination and sympathy. Though her commentary is occasionally a bit too pat and charming, these weaker moments are eclipsed by a trenchant insight into human behavior and by an irrefutable wit. She achieved popular success with her novel The Far-Away Bride (1930; published in Great Britain as Tobit Transplanted, 1931), for which she won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the A. C. Benson silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1932.

Always frail and delicate, Stella Benson was born on 6 January 1892 at Lutwyche Hall, Shropshire, to Ralph Beaumont Benson and Caroline Essex Cholmondeley Benson, the younger sister of novelist Mary Cholmondeley. Virginia Woolf later described Stella Benson in her diary as "quiet, as controlled, white, drawn as...