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, 1985.
26
His wealth and influence, as well as his painstaking realism, earned him the scorn of the modernist writers of the next generation.
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...
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1981.
260-1, 272
Friends, Associates
Ella D'Arcy
Lane
and Harland
were centres of literary social life in London. EDA
had many friends among writers, many of them New Women. They included Evelyn Sharp
, and Constance Smedley
(who found her entirely sincere...
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.
qtd. in
Stetz, Margaret, and George Paston. “Introduction”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1999, p. v - xiv.
xiv
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197
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, 1983.
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, was withdrawn from publication after threats of legal action.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, 1983, 2 vols.
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1981.
272-3
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, and Hester Helen Thackeray Fuller. Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie. J. Murray, 1924.
285-7
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.
qtd. in
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, 1997, pp. 18-46.
39
As critic Helen Small
remarks, Harvest departs from the pattern whereby...
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
Sarah Grand
Reviewers in the Independent and The Bookman disliked this novel. The Bookman called it vulgar, and worse than vulgar.
qtd. in
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge, 2000.
518
Arnold Bennett
, in Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1891), was equally...
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
9
Arnold Bennett
gave it very high praise. Of the passage in which Lucy Audley decides to try to murder Robert, he...
Literary responses
George Eliot
GE
began to be remembered quite inaccurately as a humourless and self-righteous preacher, to whom invention was less important than exhortation.
Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. W.W. Norton, 1995.
xix
Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. Hamish Hamilton, 1996.
362
In 1895George Saintsbury
, one of the shapers of English Literature...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
By 1901 MEB
was so firmly established in the literary scene that Arnold Bennett
commented: She is a part of England . . . she has woven herself into it.
qtd. in
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
