Living Alone: A House of Pomegranates Esoteric Edition

For your delectation, the House of Pomegranates edition of Living Alone by Stella Benson.

Sarah Brown lives an uneventful little life of charity committee work in 1918 London. Magic sweeps into her life when a witch invites her, David the Dog, and Humphrey the suitcase to move into ‘the House of Living Alone.’ The House of Living Alone, a rooming house for the magically inclined, introduces Sarah to witches, wizards, faeries, dragons and flying broomsticks.

fStella Benson (1892-1933) was an English feminist, travel writer and novelist. Stella was often ill during her childhood. By her sixth birthday, she and her family, based in London, had moved frequently. She spent some of her childhood in Germany and Switzerland getting an education. She began writing a diary at the age of ten and kept it up for all of her life. By the time she was writing poetry, around the age of fourteen, her mother left her father; consequently, she saw her father infrequently. When she did see him, he encouraged her to quit writing poetry for the time being, until she was older and more experienced. Instead, Stella increased her writing output, adding novel-writing to her repertoire.Stella was noted for being compassionate and interested in social issues. Like her older female relatives, she supported women's suffrage. During World War I, she supported the troops by gardening and by helping poor women in London's East End at the Charity Organisation Society. These efforts inspired Benson to write the novels I Pose (1915), This Is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919). She also published her first volume of poetry, Twenty, in 1918.She died of pneumonia just before her forty-first birthday in December 1933, in the Vietnamese province of Tonkin. Her last unfinished novel Mundos and her personal selection of her best poetry, Poems, were published posthumously in 1935. Her Collected Stories were published in 1936.

About the House of Pomegranates

Based in a haunted house in Toronto, Canada for the last 19 years, they are a small press, film makers, book and graphic designers, an arts collective, an incubator of all things whimsical and wondrous, and lastly a museum of the macabre, the melancholy and the lost. They aim to inspire, to astound, to inform and to just make lovely, practical things to hang on your wall and place on your table. They publish books old and new, make clocks, make films, make music, and now and then they make themselves late for dinner.