Living Alone
No carpets. No telephone. No charge for residence.
A young woman bursts into a committee room in wartime London, crawls under the table and confesses to stealing a bun. She registered her trade as Magic; the clerk wrote down “Machinist”.
She is a witch, and she keeps a shop on an island reached by ferry, with a lodging-house attached – the House of Living Alone. Air raids interrupt the supper parties, and high above the city the English witch meets a German one, broom to broom.
Stella Benson’s 1919 novel is a fairy tale with a ration book: a war book that will not talk like one, and a comedy about loneliness that knows what it costs.
A carefully restored text. This Squire Press edition is set from the Macmillan first edition of 1919, read page by page from a scan of its 1920 reprint and collated word by word against two other witnesses. Benson’s British spelling and every voice she took trouble to record are kept, and thirteen compositor’s errors are corrected and recorded.
- A new editor’s introduction to Benson and the novel
- Fifty-eight original endnotes on the wartime London the novel takes for granted – its committees and registers, raids and shelters, newspapers, shops and songs – gathered at the back, out of the story’s way
- Benson’s own preliminaries, including her note to the reader and the poem “The Dweller Alone”
- A Note on This Edition setting out the source text and the editorial approach
- About the Author, By the Same Author and Further Reading sections for readers who want to go on
Look Inside
There were six women, seven chairs, and a table in an otherwise unfurnished room in an unfashionable part of London. Three of the women were of the kind that has no life apart from committees. They need not be mentioned in detail.
All six women were there because their country was at war, and because they felt it to be their duty to assist it to remain at war for the present. They were the nucleus of a committee on War Savings, and they were waiting for their Chairman, who was the Mayor of the borough. He was also a grocer.
They were interrupted, not by the expected Mayor, but by a young woman, who came violently in by the street door, rushed into the middle of the room, and got under the table. The members, in surprise, pushed back their chairs and made ladylike noises of protest and inquiry.
“They’re after me,” panted the person under the table.
