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.
260-1, 272
Friends, Associates
Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
was a close friend of Rose Macaulay
, with whom in the immediate postwar period she shared entertaining duties at her flat, in something similar to a salon. They apparently met through Macaulay contributing...
She became a close friend of Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson
, of Hertha Ayrton
, physicist and suffragist, and of Ayrton's daughter, Barbara Gould
. These two women, mother and daughter, embodied a thread linking...
VH
was fascinated by the mysterious throughout her life. As a small girl, she loved to listen to her mother talk about the White Lady, a spirit haunting the kitchen of Margaret Hunt
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Wyndham Lewis
A satiric novel by WL
, The Roaring Queen, whose chief targets were Virginia Woolf
and Arnold Bennett
, was withdrawn from publication after threats of legal action. It was not published until 1973.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 15. Gale Research.
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
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
, pp. 196-09.
203
but that without...
Literary responses
Sarah Grand
In an interview in 1895, SG
distinguished between her personal beliefs and those professed by her characters: The views of Evadne or Angelica . . . are not necessarily to be accepted as my views...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
Arnold Bennett
excoriated MAW
's typical heroines as harrowing dolls and fantasised a brutal fate for them in the form of gang rape.
Small, Helen. “Mrs. Humphry Ward and the First Casualty of War”. Women’s Fiction and the Great War, edited by Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, Clarendon, pp. 18-46.
39
As critic Helen Small
remarks, Harvest departs from the pattern whereby...
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
Sarah Grand
Reviewers in the Independent and The Bookman disliked this novel. The Bookman called it vulgar, and worse than vulgar.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
518
Arnold Bennett
, in Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1891), was equally...
