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...
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1981.
260-1, 272
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, was withdrawn from publication after threats of legal action.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.
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...
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
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
