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.
VW
published in The New Statesman two letters on The Intellectual Status of Women. She was responding to views expressed by Desmond MacCarthy
, the Affable Hawk, in a review of Arnold Bennett
's Our Women 1920.
Publishing
Virginia Woolf
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.
78
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
It was reprinted in The Nation and Athenæum (of which Leonard Woolf was then literary editor) on 1 December 1923 and in the Living Age (Boston) on 2 February 1924.
Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. Clarendon Press.
157
This essay was a...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Virginia Woolf
Character in Fiction, the further essay which emerged from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, is reflective, philosophical, fictional, its tone assertive, witty, ironical, and serious. It ranges
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Editors McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson Clarke, Hogarth Press.
3: 421
living writers into two...
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.
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
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
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...
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...
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...
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
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
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...
Timeline
2 September 1914: The British War Propaganda Bureau (newly...
Writing climate item
2 September 1914
The British War Propaganda Bureau
(newly formed along the lines of a similar body in Germany) summoned twenty-five writers to discuss the production of texts that would boost national feeling and the war effort.
By April 1929: The Book Society (first conceived of by Arnold...
Writing climate item
By April 1929
The Book Society
(first conceived of by Arnold Bennett
) was launched by Hugh Walpole
with himself as chairman; it was the first such society in Britain.
Texts
Bennett, Arnold. Anna of the Five Towns. Chatto and Windus, 1902.
Bennett, Arnold. Fame and Fiction. Books for Libraries Press, 1975.
Bennett, Arnold. Imperial Palace. Cassell, 1930.
Bennett, Arnold. “Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide”. Project Gutenberg.
Bennett, Arnold. Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide. John Lane, 1898.
Bennett, Arnold. Lord Raingo. Cassell, 1926.
Bennett, Arnold. The Old Wives’ Tale. Nelson and Sons, 1908.
