This Is the End

"It is the second step of a very brilliant beginning.. You will be foolish if you miss this book. " Punch "This book shows one thing very clearly, that Miss Benson is a force to be reckoned with. " Pall Mall Gazette Stella Benson's subtle, beautiful and poignant second novel built upon the phenomenal success of her first, I Pose, which sported crazy wit and bright conceits. In the spring of 1916, we meet orphaned sister and brother Jay and Kew Martin in London. Jay (real name Jane Elizabeth) has run away from her strange, claustrophobic, interfering, well-heeled family to the simplicities of the 'Brown Borough' (otherwise Hackney), to live amongst its working-class people, to a job as a bus conductor, and to discover her own wild self. Kew is on recuperative leave from the War, and manages to find Jay in her humble new abode. She begs him to preserve her newfound freedom and not reveal her whereabouts to their family. But nothing can stop their former guardians, the eccentric writer Anonyma Martin and her husband, their dry cousin Gustus, from setting out to try to find her, using clues from Jay's letters. The problem is, Jay's letters have been fabricated from her extraordinary dream-filled imagination; she's set them on a wild goose-chase. Benson subtly reveals a lot more of her personal philosophy in This is the End. She speaks in an enigmatic, haunting and deeply felt way about the power of dreams and fantasies. She also adds two other new ingredients - poignantly sad observation of life, love, and the world, and revelatory cries of pain about the savagery and horror of the War, at the very centre of whose appalling cost she was writing, right at the crucial juncture between Victorianism and Modernity. First published in 1917, This is the End has the magnificent wit and brightness of mind which established Benson's reputation for originality, and combines them with a fresh strength of emotion and poetic expression which make for one of the most unusual and moving novels set in the home front of the First World War.