Bennett, Arnold (1867-1931) novelist

Arnold Bennett was born in the industrial town of Hanley, Staffordshire, northern England, to Enoch Bennett, a lawyer, and Sarah Ann Bennett. He attended public and private schools, including a short tenure at an art school, but never went to college because his father wanted him to join him in his law firm. Bennett studied law only halfheartedly and failed the bar twice before moving to London, where he began his career as a writer.

Bennett secured a position as the editor for the weekly magazine Woman, and after writing several pieces for various magazines and literary journals, he published his first novel, A Man from the North (1884), an apprentice piece, overshadowed by his later novels. He went on to write more than 35 novels, the best-regarded of which are a series of novels set in the region of Bennett’s childhood: The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910), and Riceyman Steps (1923).

The best of Bennett’s early novels are all unified by their setting, the northern industrial region known as the “five towns,” which the author knew well in his youth. From his memory of that area, Bennett wrote Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Leonora (1903), and Sacred and Profane Love (1905), which all unsentimentally examine women whose lives are narrowed by their materialistic pursuits.

The Old Wives’ Tale, also set in the five towns, established Bennett’s enduring reputation more than any other novel and is still considered a classic of British literature. Its attention to setting cements the five towns as a literary region comparable to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, and its treatment of characters and themes displays Bennett’s full literary capability. The novel follows two sisters, Constance and Sophia, from childhood through old age, while developing the themes of change and death. The sisters marry, with Constance remaining in England and Sophia moving with her husband to France. They experience life’s full range of emotions—happiness, frustration, and grief-while gradually, and half-unknowingly, growing old. Bennett brings the reader face-to-face with aging and death when Sophia looks upon her once young and beautiful but now dying husband, who had left her years before: “In her mind she had not pictured Gerald as a very old man. She knew that he was old; she had said to herself that he must be very old, well over seventy. But she had not pictured him.” The image she encounters makes her shudder and remark, “‘Yet a little while . . . and I shall be lying on a bed like that! And what shall I have lived for? What is the meaning of it?’”

Bennett also received critical acclaim for Clay- hanger, the first novel of a trilogy about the family of Edwin Clayhanger. Clayhanger, modeled after Bennett himself, struggles to free himself from a domineering father who wants him to join the family printing business. In addition to such parent/child conflicts, Clayhanger and its sequels, Hilda Lessways (1911) and These Twain (1916), also explore problems between the sexes.

The last novel for which Bennett earned acclaim is Riceyman Steps (1923), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It is a dark novel with Freudian sexual undertones about an elderly and miserly antique bookseller, Earlforward, who marries a widow named Violet. Largely because of Earlforward’s obsession with money and Violet’s detestation of that pursuit, the relationship becomes a mixture of love and hate that ends, eventually, in death.

During his lifetime Bennett achieved great commercial success, but many of the nation’s literary elite, including Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, turned against him late in his career and effectively pushed his work into near obscurity, mainly because he was old and a careerist. Recent scholarship has reassessed Bennett and led to a resurrection of his reputation. As the writer and Bennett biographer Frank Swinnerton observes, Bennett’s “characters are . . . illustrations of the endless foibles and endurances of mankind. . . . Bennett’s novels will live, indeed . . . future generations will see and feel in them the actual life of one part of England in a day that is already past.”

Other Work by Arnold Bennett:
- The Grand Babylon Hotel. 1902. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1992.

Works about Arnold Bennett:
- Hepburn, James, ed. Arnold Bennett. New York: Routledge, 1997.
- Squillace, Robert. Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997.