Stella Benson (1892-1933) was a British author. Of delicate health she was educated at home. At the age of 20, she undertook a journey to the West Indies, which furnished the material for her first novel, I Pose, in 1915. When she returned she took up social work.
She published a second novel before ill health led her to seek a warmer climate, and she ended up in California. She worked as maid, bill collector, and book agent before finding more solid work as a tutor at the University of California and as a reader for the University Press.
She married in 1921 and continued her travels, much of which was in the far east. Her most important work, Tobit Transplanted (1931,) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the A. C. Benson Silver Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. She died of pneumonia in China just before her 45th birthday.
