There are many factors in her life that help
to explain why she should have turned to fantasy friends and an inner world for
consolation and compensation, including a difficult family background, a
critical and unsympathetic mother, feeling different from other girls,
increasing deafness and, above all, very poor health that often kept her
bedridden and hospitalised and entailed some horrible and excruciatingly
painful medical treatments.
Such factors can be found in the lives of
many other fiction writers. Mary Webb, who has been featured on here, also
suffered from poor health and had a critical mother for example.
Great potential on the inside may be
activated and employed when there is a hostile environment on the outside.
Am I the only one?
Stella Benson wrote this when she was 15
years old:
“I
don’t know whether other people are the same as me in having an imaginary world
filled with imaginary people to whom at every spare moment of the day one’s
thoughts return. I daresay it is childish, but it has grown absolutely
indispensable to me.”
The majority of people are not the same as her. For most people, the real world is all there is; they have little contact with an inner world or other dimensions.
The majority of people are not the same as her. For most people, the real world is all there is; they have little contact with an inner world or other dimensions.
