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.
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
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...
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
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...
Friends, Associates
Evelyn Sharp
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...
Friends, Associates
May Sinclair
She had an extremely strong sense of privacy. Though at first she was pleased by the suggestion of an American journalist, Witter Bynner
, that he should interview her, and though she liked him when...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
By 1919 ES
was also friendly with Arnold Bennett
and his wife Marguerite
. Wyndham Lewis
became a great friend, did many drawings of her, and demonstrated a sexual interest in her as well, which...
Family and Intimate relationships
Iris Tree
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm
was IT
's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote...
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...
Textual Production
Rebecca West
RW
's bio-critical pamphlet Arnold Bennett Himself questioning the literary merit of Bennett
(who had died of typhoid on 26-27 March this year) and admired his portentous personality
West, Rebecca. Arnold Bennett Himself. John Day, http://UofA.
6
as his greatest creation.
Hutchinson, G. Evelyn. A Preliminary List of the Writings of Rebecca West, 1912-1951. Yale University Library.
8-9
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
Friends, Associates
Amabel Williams-Ellis
AWE
's friends and associates included Edith Sitwell
, whose poems she often published in The Spectator; Storm Jameson
, a political mentor
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
VW
published in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post the first printed version of her influential essay (another work claimed as her literary manifesto
McNeillie, Andrew, and Virginia Woolf. “Introduction”. The Common Reader, Annotated Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. ix - xv.
x
) Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.
