Phyllis Bentley

Phyllis Bentley was a prolific and successful novelist, literary critic, short-story writer, children's writer, and journalist, who was productive over a broad span of the twentieth century. Almost all her twenty-eight novels and numerous short stories are set in her native West Riding of Yorkshire and many are historical as well as regional, focussing on the textile trade and the effects of industrialization in that region. A realist with a strong sense of historical process, she sought to write novels which should present life exactly at [sic] it really was, and by so doing help to better the world. She was deeply influenced by the Brontë s, and wrote several literary studies of the history of Haworth and the Brontëfamily , as well as of the regional novel and of narrative form.