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.
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...
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...
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, was withdrawn from publication after threats of legal action.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
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...
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
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
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...
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...
