Arnold Bennett

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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, 1985.
26
His wealth and influence, as well as his painstaking realism, earned him the scorn of the modernist writers of the next generation.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photo of a young Arnold Bennett, seen half-profile in a stiff collar.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
By the time of her death, MEB 's novels had received praise from many great writers of her day, including George Moore , Arnold Bennett , Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy . Her astonishingly...
Literary responses John Galsworthy
JG 's literary reputation, established with his first Forsyte novel, was strong in the late Edwardian period and the early 1920s, but deteriorated later in the decade (though he remained very popular with the public)...
Literary responses Rhoda Broughton
An article by Eliza Lynn Linton written in June 1887 (well after the ebbing of RB 's early, scandalous reputation) judged that her books were always essentially love-stories, and nothing else,
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “Miss Broughton’s Novels”. Temple Bar, Vol.
80
, June 1887, pp. 196-09.
203
but that without...
Literary responses Margaret Kennedy
The novel's initial favourable reviews came from an earlier generation of authors, including George Moore , A. E. Housman , Thomas Hardy , Arnold Bennett , J. M. Barrie , and H. G. Wells ...
Literary responses Catherine Carswell
Reaction to this book was fiercely negative among traditional Burnsites, especially in Scotland. CC received threats to her well-being, including one letter signed Holy Willy (after a character satirised by Burns) and containing a...
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.
qtd. in
Miller, Anita, and George Paston. “Afterword”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1999, pp. 261-5.
264
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Praised in the Daily Mail and Times Literary Supplement (where the anonymous reviewer was Walter de la Mare ), Dolores was compared to its advantage with works by Ada Leverson and Arnold Bennett . ICB
Literary responses Rosamond Lehmann
Leonard Woolf (in the The Nation and Athenæum on 10 September 1927), Desmond MacCarthy , Arnold Bennett , and Rose Macaulay all had more or less serious reservations about the book: Macaulay used very readable...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Leonard Woolf's decision proved a mistake. The book was not only praised to the skies by young, advanced reviewers, but also made the secondary Book of the Month for May by the newly-formed Book Society
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot wrote in a letter that VW had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.
qtd. in
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
444
Arnold Bennett
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
The original audience included Q. D. Roth (later Leavis) and Kathleen Raine . Women writers who later counted it an important influence on them included such disparate figures as Muriel Box and Rumer Godden ...
Literary responses Hannah Lynch
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...
Literary responses Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The timing, almost coincident with the outbreak of war, caused de la Mare to add that the touch of irony in its title at the present moment is unintentional. He likened EWW to Samuel Smiles
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...
Literary responses Emmuska Baroness Orczy
EBO claimed that English readers (men for the most part) had told her that she had created a perfect representation of an English gentleman.
Orczy, Emmuska, Baroness. Links in the Chain of Life. Hutchinson, 1947.
7
Arnold Bennett , discoursing on the greater importance...

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