Arnold Bennett -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 07.02.

24, 21:00

Arnold Bennett
Arnold Bennett, (born May 27, 1867, Hanley,
Staffordshire, England—died March 27, 1931,
London), British novelist, playwright, critic, and
essayist whose major works form an important link
between the English novel and the mainstream of
Bennett, Arnold European realism.
Arnold Bennett.
Bennett’s father was a self-made man who had
managed to qualify as a solicitor: the family atmosphere was one of sturdy respectability
and self-improvement. Arnold, the eldest of nine children, was educated at the Middle
School, Newcastle-under-Lyme; he then entered his father’s office as a clerk. In 1889 he
moved to London, still as a solicitor’s clerk, but soon gained a footing in literature by
writing popular serial fiction and editing a women’s magazine. After the publication of
his first novel, A Man from the North (1898), he became a professional writer, living first
in the Bedfordshire countryside, then, following his father’s death, moving to Paris in
1903. In 1907 he married a French actress, Marguerite Soulié; they separated in 1921.

Bennett is best known for his highly detailed

novels of the “Five Towns”—the Potteries, since
amalgamated to form the city of Stoke-on-Trent, in
his native Staffordshire. As a young writer he
learned his craft from intensive study of the French
Arnold Bennett, drawing by realistic novelists, especially Gustave Flaubert and
Walter Ernest Tittle, 1923; in the Honoré de Balzac, who emphasized detailed
National Portrait Gallery, London
description of people, scenes, and events. He also
owes an immediate debt to George Moore, who
was influenced by the same writers. Bennett’s criticism was of such high calibre that, if
he had never written fiction, he would rank as an important writer. He was less
successful in his plays, although Milestones (1912), written with Edward Knoblock, and
The Great Adventure (1913), adapted from his novel of five years earlier, Buried Alive
(1908), both had long runs and have been revived.

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As early as 1893 he had used the “Five Towns” as background for a story, and his major
novels—Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and Clayhanger
(1910; included with its successors, Hilda Lessways, 1911, and These Twain, 1916, in
The Clayhanger Family, 1925)—have their setting there, the only exception being
Riceyman Steps (1923), set in a lower-middle-class district of London.

Paris during Bennett’s eight years there was the capital of the arts, and he made full use
of his opportunities to study music, art, and literature as well as life. He retained an
understanding of provincial life, but he shed the provincial outlook, becoming one of the
least insular of Englishmen. At a time when the popular culture and the arcane
complacencies of the elite were equally inbred, Bennett was a cosmopolitan who
appreciated Impressionist painting, the ballet of Serge Diaghilev, and the music of Igor
Stravinsky before they reached London. Later, reviewing a constant stream of new
books, he unerringly picked out the important writers of the next generation—James
Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway—and praised them
discerningly. When Bennett returned to England, he divided his time between London
and a country home in Essex. He never returned to the Potteries except on brief visits,
but he continued to live there imaginatively, much as Joyce did in Dublin.

Bennett wrote 30 novels, and even many of the lesser ones display the essential
Bennettian values, ironic yet kindly, critical yet with a large tolerance. His reputation
declined in the 1920s and ’30s but soon rose, partly as the result of a reevaluation of his
work by a group of young writers who felt themselves to be artistically in his debt. The
Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1896–1928 were published in three volumes (1932–33).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.

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Citation Information
Article Title: Arnold Bennett
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 23 May 2023
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Arnold-Bennett
Access Date: February 07, 2024

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