The Little World by Stella Benson (1925)

As her novels were slowly growing stranger, even quite odd, in the mid-twenties, Benson was still producing, for newspapers and magazines, the material whose tone had made her famous. These are they, pulled together into an extraordinary volume of what would loosely be called travel writings. The joys are all there: self-deprecation without maudlin, fabulous wit, human smallness in the face of the big world, vivid colour, and moments of great poignancy. What a lot of miles she covered - the pieces here range from motoring across North America to boat trips on Chinese rivers and in the Red Sea to amazingly vital pictures of the interior of China, India and Indo-China. She writes it as she sees it, too, which may be a little uncomfortable for modern eyes. If she finds something ugly she'll say so, be it an idiotic colonial official or a supposedly beautiful temple or indeed a face, of any race or culture. But what shines through that is an essential humaneness, when push comes to shove; her criticism is even-handed. The great contradiction in Benson is very well served with that point - she always felt that she was 'not quite real', or in some way lacking in full humanity. Deep humanity is what her writings most reveal - the quality of which is one of her main graces.