9 - Guiding Spirit: Stella Benson's Aunt Mary

Summary

What would it have been like to be presented to the world as a character in a novel? When Mary Cholmondeley, New Woman novelist, created her characters in her controversial novel Red Pottage, she was inspired by some of her own family. This essay will deal with the significance of one of her very minor characters, Stella Gresley, a four-or-five-year-old niece of one of the heroines of the novel, Hester Gresley. Described by her Aunt Hester as an analytical child, with ‘determination to reach central facts and to penetrate to the root of the matter’, the fictional Stella is clearly both curious and independent. These qualities lead Aunt Hester to ponder what her rigid clergyman brother ‘would make of his daughter when she turned her attention to theology’. Cholmondeley had a niece, Stella, who was just about the age of the fictional Stella when Cholmondeley was writing her novel. In 1899 when the novel was published, the seven-year-old Stella Benson was probably not aware of the compliment being paid her. Later Benson would have found the tribute amusing. Her appearance in Red Pottage had predicted her coming of age as a second-wave New Woman writer. Cholmondeley, on the other hand, would have had reason both to congratulate herself and to wring her hands as her prediction about the fictional Stella proved only too accurate in the real Stella. This insight was especially the case as Cholmondeley would become the mentor of her niece. Their important relationship was not always easy or simple.

Stella Benson (1892–1933) owed a considerable debt to her aunt and the women writers of earlier generations. While the aunt and niece did not share similar subjects and styles, the early guidance and encouragement by Cholmondeley deeply affected Benson's successful career as a fiction writer, essayist and diarist. Cholmondeley shared her own literary influences and understanding with an imaginative young girl growing up uncertain of her place in a slowly changing society where gender still made a significant difference.