Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Arnold Bennett
-
Standard Name: Bennett, Arnold
Birth Name: Enoch Arnold Bennett
Used Form: E. A. Bennett
An extraordinarily prolific English writer of both literary-realist and mass-interest novels, short stories, pocket philosophy self-help manuals, plays, journal articles and book reviews, AB
was acclaimed as an artist in his own time and was also politically and culturally influential. He served as director of the Ministry of Propaganda under Lord Beaverbrook
in the first world war. He estimated his own output in 1930 as seventy or eighty books written, of which only a handful were well-known.
Staley, Thomas F., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 34. Gale Research.
26
His wealth and influence, as well as his painstaking realism, earned him the scorn of the modernist writers of the next generation.
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
272-3
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, and Hester Helen Thackeray Fuller. Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie. J. Murray.
285-7
Textual Features
Dorothy Richardson
In addition to her chosen themes, DR
also charts the development of female consciousness through her literary techniques, which strongly disrupt gender, generic, and linguistic conventions. In her 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage, she recalls...
Literary responses
George Paston
In an article for The Academy entitled Some Younger Reputations, Arnold Bennett
assessed GP
's novels by saying that no matter what their faults, they are the best woman's rights pamphlets ever written.
Miller, Anita, and George Paston. “Afterword”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, pp. 261-5.
264
Family and Intimate relationships
George Paston
Emily Symonds was named after her mother, born Emily Hannah Evans
, who was also interested in books.
Stetz, Margaret, and George Paston. “Introduction”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, p. v - xiv.
vii
Arnold Bennett
(a friend) described her as an ample little lady, with a quick cheerful laugh...
Residence
George Paston
The novelist Arnold Bennett
, with whom they exchanged frequent visits, described their home as a place of literature, quietude, the restraint of an eighteenth-century demeanor—and sincere artistic purpose too.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197
Stetz, Margaret, and George Paston. “Introduction”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, p. v - xiv.
vii
Friends, Associates
George Paston
GP
was on good terms with Arnold Bennett
, who admired her writing as well as her mind, describing her in his journal as the most advanced and intellectually fearless woman I have met.
Stetz, Margaret, and George Paston. “Introduction”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, p. v - xiv.
xiv
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197
Cultural formation
George Paston
GP
remained single all her life; her plays suggest a skeptical yet sentimental attitude towards marriage. Arnold Bennett
records a debate with GP
about this topic, in which he tried in vain to oppose her...
Literary responses
George Paston
Arnold Bennett
seems to have admired this novel enough to review it twice. Writing as Sarah Volatile (from sal volatile, meaning smelling salts) in Hearth and Home, he recommended it to his readers as...
DM
has written a number of TV screenplays, both from her own prose and that of others, and in the form of original scripts, from which several of her novels were expanded. She has adapted...
Textual Production
Naomi Mitchison
By the early 1930s NM
was making as much by her writing, in real terms, as nearly fifty years later. She reviewed novels—reading at great speed even while breast-feeding, since she claimed that [i]f the...
This article caused controversy, as did HL
's claim, in the correspondence which followed, to speak for authentic Parisian intellectual circles, not the decadent ones admired by the English and Americans. In this argument she...
