Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part I

I recently re-read Stella Benson’s fantasy novel Living Alone to see what she has to say about witches. As with many other books featured on here, I first read it many years ago and just for entertainment. 

At the time, I overlooked things that now seem very significant indeed; I now see that there is enough material about witches, wizards and magic to generate more than one article.

There are also some autobiographical elements in the book; they will be included in an article about Stella Benson herself.

Part I starts with an overview of Living Alone and continues with some material from the book about magic and its practitioners.

About Living Alone

Living Alone consists of just ten chapters, so it is sometimes called a novella.

Living Alone has been described as a comedy, but it mentions desolation and has a horrible ending.

It is a very strange and unusual book, yet there are some familiar elements:

There are whimsical descriptions in Living Alone that make me think of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

The witches and their broomsticks in the book remind me of Terry Pratchett and his witches.

There are a few scenes that remind me of the use of magic in Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life.

London has a magic of its own. There are many references to locations in London, places that I know well and enjoy reading about. Stella Benson was writing from experience: she too knew London well.

Anyone who wants to read Living Alone will find it on Project Gutenberg.

Magical and non-magical people

This is how Stella Benson’s introduction begins:

“This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser.”

My first reaction to the real books for real people statement was to think of the comedy team League of Gentlemen and their local shop for local people - and by coincidence Living Alone features a general shop for local people - but I take Stella Benson’s division of humanity into a majority of ‘real people’ and a minority of magically-minded people very seriously.

Something similar can be found in many other places, J. K. Rowling’s witches and wizards versus the Muggles in the Harry Potter books for example. The classification of people as either creative or mundane is relevant too. We also have independent people versus the herd members. 

The characters in Living Alone

The characters are divided into some supernatural beings, a handful of magical people, many real people and an in-betweener. The latter is an autobiographical character who is neither one thing nor the other.

The magical people are the witches and wizards. Many of the real people are bureaucratic and have official positions: they include committee members of a charity that helps the deserving poor for example.

Witches and wizards and magic

From time to time Stella Benson makes pronouncements in Living Alone about witches, wizards and magic. She has some unusual ideas; for example, she says that practitioners of magic are people who are incarnating for the first time:

“Now witches and wizards, as you perhaps know, are people who are born for the first time. I suppose we have all passed through this fair experience, we must all have had our chance of making magic ...

Witches and wizards are now rare, though not so rare as you think. Remembering nothing, they know nothing, and are not bored. They have to learn everything from the very beginning, except magic...”

“One only has power in one’s first life - old souls have none.”

Magic people are heartless, but cannot be blamed for this:

“A heart is a sort of degree conferred by Providence on those who have passed a certain examination. Magic people are only freshmen in our college, and it is useless for us—secure in the possession of many learned letters after our names—to despise them. They will become sophisticated in due course.”

While Terry Pratchett’s witches behave like responsible adults in a world full of children, Stella Benson’s magic people are like children in a world full of adults:

“…he was making the usual effort of magic to appear real. Witches and wizards lead difficult lives because they have no ancestry working within them to prompt them in the little details. Whenever you see a person being unusually grown-up, suspect them of magic. You can always notice witches and wizards, for instance, after eight o'clock at night, pretending that they are not proud of sitting up late. It is all nonsense about witches being night birds; they often fly about at night, indeed, but only because they are like permanent children gloriously escaped for ever from their Nanas.”

She also mentions the strange effects that some magic people have on their surroundings: 

“Magic is a disconcerting travelling companion. While seldom actually conspicuous, it seems to have a mysterious and varying effect on the surrounding public.”

“Sarah Brown…was unaware of the risk she ran in entering a public conveyance in company with a witch.”

As mentioned in a few articles, I have had some strange experiences on buses myself!

Still to come
Future articles will go into details of some of the individual characters and cover some more relevant material, including the practising of magic and the boarding house known as the House of Living Alone.