Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.

Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.

Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).

Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.

Life and career

Early years

Arnold Bennett was born on 27 May 1867 in Hanley, Staffordshire, now part of Stoke-on-Trent but then a separate town. He was the eldest child of the three sons and three daughters Together, they explored the world of literature. Among the writers who impressed and influenced Bennett were George Moore, Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev. He continued his own writing, and won a prize of twenty guineas from Tit-Bits in 1893 for his story 'The Artist's Model'; another short story, 'A Letter Home', was submitted successfully to The Yellow Book, where it featured in 1895 alongside contributions from Henry James and other well-known writers.

In 1894 Bennett resigned from the law firm and became assistant editor of the magazine Woman. The salary, £150 a year, was £50 less than he was earning as a clerk, but the post left him much more free time to write his first novel. For the magazine he wrote under a range of female pen-names such as "Barbara" and "Cecile". As his biographer Margaret Drabble puts it:

The informal office life of the magazine suited Bennett, not least because it brought him into lively female company, and he began to be a little more relaxed with young women. He continued work on his novel and wrote short stories and articles. He was modest about his literary talent: he wrote to a friend, "I have no inward assurance that I could ever do anything more than mediocre viewed strictly as art – very mediocre", but he knew he could "turn out things which would be read with zest, & about which the man in the street would say to friends 'Have you read so & so in the What-is-it?" He was happy to write for popular journals like Hearth and Home or for the highbrow The Academy.

His debut novel, A Man from the North, completed in 1896, was published two years later, by John Lane, whose reader, John Buchan, recommended it for publication. It elicited a letter of praise from Joseph Conrad and was well and widely reviewed, but Bennett's profits from the sale of the book were less than the cost of having it typed.

In 1896 Bennett was promoted to be editor of Woman; by then he had set his sights on a career as a full-time author, but he served as editor for four years.

Freelance; Paris

In 1900 Bennett resigned his post at Woman, and left London to set up house at Trinity Hall Farm, near the village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire, where he made a home not only for himself but for his parents and younger sister. He completed Anna of the Five Towns in 1901; it was published the following year, as was its successor, The Grand Babylon Hotel. The latter, an extravagant story of crime in high society, sold 50,000 copies in hardback and was almost immediately translated into four languages. By this stage he was confident enough in his abilities to tell a friend:

thumb|left|alt=exterior of 19th-century Parisian appartement block|upright|Rue d'Aumale, Bennett's second address in Paris

In January 1902 Enoch Bennett died, after a decline into dementia. His widow chose to move back to Burslem, and Bennett's sister married shortly afterwards. With no dependants, Bennett − always a devotee of French culture Biographers have speculated on his precise reasons for doing so. Drabble suggests that perhaps "he was hoping for some kind of liberation. He was thirty-five and unmarried"; in the view of the biographer Reginald Pound it was "to begin his career as a man of the world".

Life in Paris evidently helped Bennett overcome much of his remaining shyness with women. His journals for his early months in Paris mention a young woman identified as "C" or "Chichi", who was a chorus girl; the journals – or at least the cautiously selected extracts published since his death

In a restaurant where he dined frequently a trivial incident in 1903 gave Bennett the germ of an idea for the novel generally regarded as his masterpiece. A grotesque old woman came in and caused a fuss; the beautiful young waitress laughed at her, and Bennett was struck by the thought that the old woman had once been as young and lovely as the waitress. From this grew the story of two contrasting sisters in The Old Wives' Tale. He did not begin work on that novel until 1907, before which he wrote ten others, some "sadly undistinguished", in the view of his biographer Kenneth Young. Throughout his career, Bennett interspersed his best novels with some that his biographers and others have labelled pot-boilers.

Marriage; Fontainebleau and US visit

thumb|upright=0.7|alt=Head and torso of standing middle-aged white man, in a dark suit, with full head of wavy dark hair, looking to the side. He has a neat, medium-sized moustache|Bennett,

In 1905 Bennett became engaged to Eleanor Green, a member of an eccentric and capricious American family living in Paris, but at the last moment, after the wedding invitations had been sent out, she broke off the engagement and almost immediately married a fellow American. Drabble comments that Bennett was well rid of her, but it was a painful episode in his life. In early 1907 he met Marguerite Soulié (1874–1960), who soon became first a friend and then a lover. In May he was taken ill with a severe gastric complaint, and Marguerite moved into his flat to look after him. They became still closer, and in July 1907, shortly after his fortieth birthday, they were married at the Mairie of the 9th arrondissement. The marriage was childless. Early in 1908 the couple moved from the rue d'Aumale to the Villa des Néfliers in Fontainebleau-Avon, about 40 miles (64 km) south-east of Paris.

Lucas comments that the best of the novels written while in France – Whom God Hath Joined (1906), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), and Clayhanger (1910) – "justly established Bennett as a major exponent of realistic fiction". in the first three days of his stay in New York he was interviewed 26 times by journalists. While rival E.P. Dutton had secured rights to such Bennett novels as Hilda Lessways and the Card (retitled Denry the Audacious), Doran, who travelled everywhere with Bennett while in America, was the publisher of Bennett's wildly successful 'pocket philosophies' How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day and Mental Efficiency. Of these books the influential critic Willard Huntington Wright wrote that Bennett had "turned preacher and a jolly good preacher he is". While in the US Bennett also sold the serial rights of his forthcoming novel, The Price of Love (1913–14), to Harpers for £2,000, eight essays to Metropolitan magazine for a total of £1,200, and the American rights of a successor to Clayhanger for £3,000. during which time he wrote The Regent, a light-hearted sequel to The Card, Bennett and his wife moved from France to England. Initially they lived in Putney, but "determined to become an English country landowner", he bought Comarques, an early-18th-century country house at Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, and moved there in February 1913. Among his early concerns, once back in England, was to succeed as a playwright. He had dabbled previously but his inexperience showed. The Times thought his 1911 comedy The Honeymoon, staged in the West End with a starry cast,

Writing in the 1990s the literary critic John Carey called for a reappraisal of Bennett in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992):

In 2006 Koenigsberger commented that one reason why Bennett's novels had been sidelined, apart from "the exponents of modernism who recoiled from his democratising aesthetic programme", was his attitude to gender. His books include the pronouncements "the average man has more intellectual power than the average woman" and "women as a sex love to be dominated"; Koenigsberger nevertheless praises Bennett's "sensitive and oft-praised portrayals of female figures in his fiction".

Legacy

Arnold Bennett Society

thumb|upright|alt=Statue of neatly-dressed, seated man holding an open book and gesturing, as if discussing it with someone|Statue of Bennett outside the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent

The society was founded in 1954 "to promote the study and appreciation of the life, works and times not only of Arnold Bennett himself but also of other provincial writers, with particular relationship to North Staffordshire." In 2021 its president was Denis Eldin, Bennett's grandson; among the vice presidents was Margaret Drabble.

In 2017 the society instituted an annual Arnold Bennett Prize as part of the author's 150th-anniversary celebrations, to be awarded to an author who was born, lives or works in North Staffordshire and has published a book in the relevant year or to the author of a book which features the region. In 2017 John Lancaster won the award for his poetry collection Potters: A Division of Labour. Subsequent winners have been Jan Edwards for her novel Winter Downs (2018), Charlotte Higgins for Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths (2019) and Lisa Blower for her story collection It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's (2020). The prize was not awarded in 2021 because of the Covid-19 situation, but in 2022 it was won by John Pye, a former detective inspector turned crime writer, for his novel Where the Silent Screams Are Loudest. The prize in 2023 went to Philip Nanney Williams for his book Adams: Britain's Oldest Potting Dynasty.

Plaques and statuary

Bennett has been commemorated by several plaques. Hugh Walpole unveiled one at Comarques in 1931, and in the same year another was placed at Bennett's birthplace in Hanley. A plaque to and bust of Bennett were unveiled in Burslem in 1962, and there are blue plaques commemorating him at the house in Cadogan Square where he lived from 1923 to 1930 and on the house in Cobridge where he lived in his youth. The southern Baker Street entrance of Chiltern Court has a plaque to Bennett on the left and another to H. G. Wells on the right. A blue plaque has been placed on the wall of Bennett's home in Fontainebleau. outside The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, unveiled on 27 May 2017 during the events marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Archives

There are substantial archives of Bennett's papers and artworks, including drafts, diaries, letters, photographs, and watercolours, at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent and at Keele University. Other Bennett papers are held by University College London, the British Library, Staffordshire University's Special Collections and, in the US, Texas and Yale universities and the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.

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Art

Bennett was a keen amateur artist. The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery holds a collection of his watercolours and drawings. An exhibition of his paintings, as well as personal objects and photographs, entitled "Arnold Bennett in Life and Art", was held at the same gallery from 18 February to 2 July 2017, as part of the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.-->

Omelette

Bennett shares with the composer Gioachino Rossini, the singer Nellie Melba and some other celebrities the distinction of having a well-known dish named in his honour. An omelette Arnold Bennett is one that incorporates smoked haddock, hard cheese (typically Cheddar), and cream. by the chef Jean Baptiste Virlogeux. It remains a British classic; cooks from Marcus Wareing to Delia Smith and Gordon Ramsay have published their recipes for it, and a variant remains on the menu at the Savoy Grill.

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

  • (The English Novelists series)

Further reading

  • Shapcott, John (2017). Arnold Bennett Companion, Vol. II. Leek, Staffs: Churnet Valley Books. .
  • Squillace, Robert (1997). Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. .

See also

  • List of people who have declined a British honour
  • Arnold Bennett Society Website

Works