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.
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.
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
George Paston
In an article for The Academy entitled Some Younger Reputations, Arnold Bennett
assessed GP
's novels by saying that no matter what their faults, they are the best woman's rights pamphlets ever written.
qtd. in
Miller, Anita, and George Paston. “Afterword”. A Writer of Books, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1999, pp. 261-5.
264
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
Leonard Woolf
(in the The Nation and Athenæum on 10 September 1927), Desmond MacCarthy
, Arnold Bennett
, and Rose Macaulay
all had more or less serious reservations about the book: Macaulay used very readable...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Praised in the Daily Mail and Times Literary Supplement (where the anonymous reviewer was Walter de la Mare
), Dolores was compared to its advantage with works by Ada Leverson
and Arnold Bennett
. ICB
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.
qtd. in
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
444
Arnold Bennett
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Leonard Woolf's decision proved a mistake. The book was not only praised to the skies by young, advanced reviewers, but also made the secondary Book of the Month for May by the newly-formed Book Society
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...
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
George Paston
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
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
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...
