Stella Benson (1892-1933) was a novelist, poet, travel writer and early campaigner for women’s rights, her feminism galvanised by Emily Davison’s protest at the Epsom Derby in 1913. In the fervid debates between the suffragists and the suffragettes, she eventually favoured the latter’s more militant approach. Yet even as this distinction became a feature of her first novel, Benson did not spare her compatriots her satirical gaze. “How superbly you’ve done the snake that was the soul of the suffrage movement,” wrote Dame Rebecca West. “How lucky you are to have written the only novel of genius about the Suffrage.”

I Pose, in other words, has a wide-ranging ambition that exceeds the merely polemical. Benson’s art is concerned with authenticity, and whether it is even possible within the constraints of our human vulnerabilities. We are performative creatures, insists Benson’s narrator, with an array of “poses” at our disposal. The gardener and the suffragette are never named, but their individuality burns through all the same. Benson may be fascinated by the prison of identity, but has more to say about its occasional ruptures.

Even the novelist is assuming a pose. Describing the suffragette, Benson tells us that “her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction”. Her narrative voice is continually reminding us of the futility of its own commentary. She notes that “the gardener had a morbid craving for unpopularity, it was part of the unique pose”, but then adds a kind of rationale: “Unpopularity is an excellent salve to the conscience, it is delicious to be misunderstood.” What is the value of these observations, Benson seems to imply, when they are based on the choices that the author has made about her own creations?

Surprisingly, the result is never alienating; we do not experience in these pages the novelistic equivalent of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect). This is doubtless a consequence of Benson’s elegant prose style, and a deft poeticism that shimmers with passion and wit. Consider this passage in I Pose concerning the aftermath of a deadly earthquake:

“Distracted men and women panted and moaned and tore at the wreckage with bleeding hands. A little crying crowd was collected round a woman who lay nailed to the ground by a mountain of bricks, with her face fixed in a glare of terrible surprise. By the cathedral steps the dead lay in a row, shoulder to shoulder, with the horrid uniformity of sprats upon a plate.”

As a simple and poignant coda to this scene, a small dog scurries amidst the chaos, “looking for its past in the extraordinary mazes of the present”.

As for women’s rights, Benson teases those readers who might be put off by the prominence of the suffragette in her story. “You need not be afraid,” she writes. “There is not going to be so very much about the cause in this book.” This joyously self-referential quality was to become a recurring feature of Benson’s work. In Pipers and a Dancer (1924), she describes her protagonist Ipsie as possessing a “forest of poses” and being one who “could not escape from the sight of herself”. Ipsie later admits that she is “only copying the heroine of one of Stella Benson’s novels”.

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I particularly like Benson’s pose as the strongarmed author in This Is the End (1917), grudgingly following the conventions of her craft: “I might as well introduce you to the Family before I settle down to the story. From careful study of press reviews I gather that a story is considered a necessary thing in a novel, so this time I am going to try and include one.” Uncommon for their time, these kinds of metafictional gestures are rarely intrusive. Benson has an instinct for comic timing and restraint, and the narrative voice never veers from the mischievous to the outright cynical.

Benson sustains this delicate balance throughout her work. It is most notable in her characterisations, which can be barbed without being cruel. Edward in The Poor Man (1922) must surely rank as one of the finest studies of masculine fragility in all fiction. He gropes for our pity and we oblige, while nervously detecting our own foibles in his behaviour. The novel is punctuated with small asides that are intensely revealing. “Edward never, in the whole course of his life, forgot any derogatory personal remark made about himself in his hearing. He luxuriated too much in the criticism of others to forget it.”

It is in this kind of blistering economy that Benson shines. Where some authors might spend whole paragraphs describing their characters, Benson successfully conveys so much of their inner lives through the most seemingly trivial of details. There is Mrs Lorne in Goodbye, Stranger (1926) who “spent every minute regretting the last minute”. As for her husband: “He was a small man of about forty-five. He looked like a large man in miniature.” Even a seemingly throwaway description of a cat in The Poor Man is more suggestive than it needs to be. “It was a parasite of a cat; it prided itself on being a member of an ancient civilisation. It never moved except to move away.”

Such anthropomorphic playfulness is not merely for humorous effect. In Benson’s vision, the natural world is invested with agency, a form of animism that sees humankind as subordinate to a greater, invisible will. Her novels allow us brief glimpses of an oneiric realm, accessible simply by an effort of the imagination. Before the First World War, Benson had volunteered as part of a charity organisation to help the underprivileged in Hoxton. This scenario became the basis for the character of Sarah Brown in Living Alone (1919), who is eventually lured away from her charity work to a house of witches and ghouls. It is one of many instances of the author reinterpreting her own life experiences through a phantasmagorical lens.

One particularly memorable chapter sees two witches — one English and one German — battling on their broomsticks high in the London skies during an air-raid. Whereas Benson’s work often has flavours of magical realism, Living Alone is an episodic prose poem whose entire internal logic is more akin to a dream. Some have connected the author’s affinity for fantasy to her own physical incapacities as a child. She grew up continually on the verge of death, suffering from bronchitis and pleurisy. Her survival was almost certainly a matter of sheer tenacity. “I insist on ignoring the whole condition,” she wrote. “If I must die, I’ll die as alive as I can.”

But if Living Alone is a form of feminist escapism, This is the End is a rebuttal to such indulgences. It tells the story of Jay, a young woman who has run away from home to become a bus conductor. I would describe her as the novel’s heroine, only Benson forbids it. “I cannot introduce you to a heroine,” she writes, “because I have never met one.” Jay does not inform her family of her new occupation, but rather spends her working days plunged in reveries of a mysterious house by the sea. In their attempts to locate her, the family eventually reach the imaginary house Jay has described so vividly in her letters. In doing so, they destroy it.

That Benson was largely confined to her bed for most of her childhood may account for her later determination to explore the globe. She produced two travel books – The Little World (1925) and Worlds Within Worlds (1928) — in which the reader is offered a series of lively anecdotes ranging from America to the Far East. This wanderlust was the stimulus for much of her fiction. Most of her novels are set abroad, and I Pose was inspired by a cruise trip she took with her mother to Jamaica.

Yet Benson’s fascination for unfamiliar cultures might also prevent any possible revival of her literary reputation. The later part of I Pose, located in the West Indies, contains descriptions of indigenous people that are shocking by today’s standards, and would doubtless see Benson dismissed as a racist. Her narrator certainly holds views that are rightly abhorred today, but the fact that no contemporary reviews of the novel commented upon these features should be sufficient evidence that they were unremarkable at the time. Benson’s racial prejudices, in other words, can be readily accounted for by the fact that she had the disadvantage of being born in 1892.

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Perhaps Benson’s lineage would be considered even more damning. Her mother was from aristocratic stock, and her family made its fortune in the 18th century through the managing of slaves. Given that the British Library was recently compiling a “watchlist” of authors with family connections to the slave trade, and that activists masquerading as academics are frantically engaged in the “decolonisation” of curricula, the fashions of the moment are clearly unfavourable for Benson’s work to be widely rediscovered.

“A curious feeling: when a writer like Stella Benson dies,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary, “that one’s response is diminished; Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened.” Benson’s death from pneumonia in 1933 in what is now northern Vietnam cut short a talent that was still on an upward trajectory. Her last published novel Tobit Transplanted (1930) was her most acclaimed (Woolf wrote to Benson to say that she envied her for this work) and an unfinished novel published posthumously in 1935 as Mundos could well have surpassed it in completed form.

So while a renewal of interest remains unlikely, Benson’s work cannot be recommended enough. To read her books is to glean a thrilling insight into a singular worldview, one driven by a passion for the unseen and the unknowable. Like the gardener and the suffragette, we become fellow travellers on a strange and exhilarating journey.

The bicycle is not only a clean, healthy, enjoyable, and efficient mode of transport: it has also played a key role in the emancipation of women. One of the founders of the American feminist movement, Susan B. Anthony, said in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel — the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”

The bicycle, as we now know the basic design, came into availability in the 1880s — the earlier bikes, like the penny-farthing, were uncomfortable and impractical. Up to the 1890s, according to Ray Strachey in her renowned history of the women’s movement, The Cause, it was not generally accepted for respectable woman to move about freely. It was the advent of the bicycle that liberated these late-Victorian girls, and virtually ushered in H.G. Wells’ “New Woman” for the turn of the century, (and the Suffrage campaign which subsequently arose.)

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But “the women who first began to ride upon this queer machine were thought to be incredibly adventurous, and most people also thought them shocking,” wrote Strachey. Only men’s bikes were available at the beginning, she recalled, and the early female pioneers were hooted at in the street, since they were often wearing “Bloomers”. These were the loose-fitting knee-length garments, like oversize knickers, invented by Amelia Bloomer, as an alternative to the crinoline and the bustle.

But whatever they wore, these bright young women thought the bicycle a stupendously good thing. Not only did they discover “the exquisite pleasure of rapid motion”, but the possession of a bicycle meant “they were no longer prisoners in their own houses”. They could “spin off” wherever they liked, assert their independence, gratified by the knowledge that they only “relied upon their own muscle”.

Still, bicycles were quite expensive at first, and such intrepid women bikers were usually from more affluent backgrounds. You don’t see archive photos or illustrations of women from mines or mill-towns riding bicycles until much later. My Edwardian uncle, born in 1908, recounted how the bike became cheaper after the end of the First World War: by 1920, you could buy a bike for just over a quid — he paid a guinea (£1 and a shilling) for his, in the mid-1920s, although admittedly that still represented a week’s wages for some working men.

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The bike also started to play a role in changing courtship habits. Before bicycles were avaialable, matches and marriages were often made within the radius of a community, or however far a couple could walk. This restricted the gene pool, and shared kinship was frequently quite high in village schools The bicycle enabled a healthy young man to cycle 50 or 60 miles to meet a more distant sweetheart (although girls rode bicycles, males were still expecting to do the courting.)

By mid-20^th century, the motor-car had reduced the status of the bicycle. It had been much-used, of course, during the Second World War, but subsequently relegated, somewhat, to the proletarian of the transportation world. In movies, poor Italians rode bicycles, while young Americans had fabulous cars with tail fins, à la James Dean.

But the bike has always had its fans, and it has always been invoked when petrol scarcity occurred. And that’s just what happened during the French students’ rebellion in May 1968. Due to nationwide strikes, there was a severe shortage of petrol all over the country, and public transport, as well as much car travel, ground to a halt. I was a reporter on the London Evening Standard at the time, and the Editor, Charles Wintour (father of the now more famous Dame Anna) took it into his head to despatch me to Paris, from London, on a bicycle. So off I went.

I look back now on the extreme informality with which all this was arranged. Health and safety wasn’t mentioned. There were, of course, no mobile phones — I had to find public phone boxes en route to transmit my reports. I didn’t possess anything as fancy as a cycle helmet. Neither did I actually own a bike: I just hired one from a Clerkenwell bike shop. Some French money was provided by the Beaverbrook accounts department, I bought myself a couple of maps and I set off for the Dover Road.

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I crossed to Calais, and rode towards Paris, via Montreuil, Amiens and Beauvais. It was a glorious May and the countryside was exhilarating. There were adventures: I encountered a couple who had sheltered a British airman during the Second World War, struck up a helpful conversation with a woman in Beauvais and was pursued through a dark copse by a Frenchman in a fast car, probably with a little light rape in mind — how did he get the petrol to drive? — but I somehow gave him the slip. Paris was in full revolutionary mode when I arrived, in the traditional manner of the French exuberantly taking to the streets. My most vivid memory was that the students were burning down the stock exchange — La Bourse — declaring the end of capitalism. I was 24 and thought it all terrifically exciting.

Then I joined Wintour and some other Brits at the Crillon Hotel for drinks and dear Robin Day made a gentlemanly pass. Then I was ordered to ride all the way back again. Which I did.

That bike was a modest little number, but it behaved robustly, across cobblestones and rough roads, sometimes traversing motorways briefly. I don’t remember any punctures, or problems with the chain.

Looking back, however, I’m alarmed at how under-equipped I was, and how casually I embarked on the assignment. (I’m even more alarmed to remember that I sometimes halted for lunch at some cosy bistrot and drank a good half-bottle of wine with the repast, without thinking twice about the consequences.)

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I’m glad that a younger generation today has much better facilities for cycling — cycle lanes and paths, adapted clothing and shoes, Google maps, and a more serious approach to the whole endeavour. It’s upsetting to read of the deaths of cyclists, who can be vulnerable in heavy traffic — people should be able to cycle in safety. Every city should try to look more like Amsterdam and Copenhagen for cyclists, and post-Covid, I believe many more will do so. The cleaner air of the traffic-free (or traffic-lessened) roads has also been a source of great bicycling encouragement.

And I can see the bike going from strength to strenth: a boom in electric bikes, which are getting cheaper all the time, and are terrific for older people. There’s something else I notice that seems rather enticing for the, ahem, senior citizen (“soixante-huitards” — 1968ers, as the French call our generation) and that is the adult tricycle. They look amazingly jolly, and that road to Dover, and maybe even Calais, seems really quite inviting on a trike.

During the period of lockdown, the feeling of being “imprisoned in one’s own home” — like those frustrated Victorian ladies — has sometimes been a little overwhelming. The bicycle is just the thing to set the people free.

The idea was to discard items that symbolised women’s oppression. Passers-by were invited to join in, and at some stage, rumour has it, one of the bins was set alight — but the organisers have always denied this.

Not only did those women galvanise a movement, they gave birth to one of the most enduring myths of early feminism: that women literally ‘burned their bras’.

The Miss America protest sealed the beginning of feminism’s second wave: the Suffragettes had won the right for some women to vote, but true liberation was still light years away. I can safely say, as someone who found feminism as a 17-year-old in 1979, it still is.

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The chance for British feminists to make their mark came shortly after. In February 1970, a small group of young women organised the first national Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) conference at Ruskin College, Oxford — a landmark moment in the second-wave of feminism.

The idea for the 1970 conference came from Sheila Rowbotham, now a noted historian, and Arielle Aberson, a Ruskin student from Switzerland who was tragically killed in a car crash only months later.

The organisers had expected a crowd of around 100 — but over 400 turned up. The venue had to be moved to the bigger Oxford Union, where delegates covered the statues of men by draping them with women’s shawls. The crèche of 60 children was run entirely by men.

Feminist publisher Sue O’Sullivan describes the 1970 event as a weekend filled with the new discoveries of women’s liberation:

“We looked at what ‘patriarchy’ meant and how to challenge it. We listened to stories of equal pay struggles and examined questions of women and class. With toddlers in tow, mothers, fathers and others addressed questions of childcare, contraception, sexuality, and more.”

The ‘minimum demands’ of the conference were equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and free 24-hour nurseries. And such was the energy created, several campaigns for legislative change, such as the Equal Pay Act, were kick started. Following the event, newly-invigorated feminists began setting up the first domestic violence refuges and rape crisis centres.

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Sally Alexander, another Ruskin student, also helped organise the event. It certainly inspired her into direct action: a few months later, in November 1970, Alexander orchestrated the now world-famous disruption of the Miss World pageant in London. Dozens of feminists bought tickets to the televised event, and (in front of millions of viewers) threw flour bombs, putting a dramatic halt to proceedings.

One criticism of the early WLM is that it was dominated by white, middle-class women. But feminism is not, and never has been, just for privileged women. The original conference in 1970 included trade unionists and working-class women and was held at an adult education college.

The Equal Pay Act became law in 1970, but according to the Fawcett Society, equal pay is still ‘a distant dream’. The majority (60%) of women in workplaces across the UK believe they are earning less than men who are doing the same job.

The Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1970 but did not become became law until 1975. It was hoped by early feminists that it would serve to protect women from discrimination on the grounds of sex or marital status. But today it is as likely to be used by men claiming they are discriminated against — for example when free drinks are offered to women in bars to promote ‘Lady’s Night’ — than it is by women facing real sexism.

We have come a long way since 1970. At that time, FGM (female genital mutilation) was not a crime, women were denied anonymity when reporting rape and sexual assault, domestic violence was considered to be a ‘private matter’ between husband and wife, and no laws whatsoever were in place to protect lesbians from discrimination.

During the 1970s through to the 1990s, lesbians were in danger of losing custody of their children, often to abusive ex-husbands, for no other reason than their sexuality. Today, lesbians can foster, adopt, marry and have joint custody as same sex couples.

But sexual violence is still a global pandemic. Despite decades of effort from feminists such as myself, in the UK only 1.4% of reported rapes in 2019 will result in a conviction — a significant decrease from a decade ago.

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‘Women’s Liberation at 50’ will see women of all ages interact and learn from each other. In today’s climate of a feminism that better suits men that women, many young women in universities are much more likely to be picketing outside of our feminist events, shouting ‘blow jobs are real jobs’ and ‘trans-rights are women’s rights’ than demanding equal pay, maternity leave or an end to male violence.

But the tide is turning and a genuine, grass-roots feminism is enjoying a revival, as attendance of the recent women’s liberation conference in London indicated. One thousand women (and a few men) were there. And the message was that feminism is a collective movement, not about individual women breaking through the glass ceiling.

“We can challenge sexism, and the likes of Harvey Weinstein. We don’t have to stand for this shit anymore,” says one of the organisers of tomorrow’s event, Tracy Walsh. “In the 60s and 70s there was some fantastic activism that needs to be revived today. Imagine turning up at Miss World and disrupting it in the way that Sally did.”

I hope passionately that the conference does inspire and invigorate — just as I was inspired and invigorated in 1979. For, despite 50 years of campaigning, young women are, in many ways, worse off. Feminism is the only social justice movement on the planet that prioritises women and girls. We must inspire a new generation to take up the mantle.