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BENNETT, Arnold

British novelist and non-fiction writer (1867-1931)

Bennett worked as a journalist (he once edited Woman's Own), and then spent eight years in Paris, setting himself up as playwright, novelist and essayist. He was a workaholic, writing hundreds of thousands of words each year, and much of his output was pot boiling. But his best novels and stories, set in the English Midlands (the area he called 'the Five Towns', now Stoke-on-Trent), are masterpieces. They deal in a realistic way with the lives and aspirations of ordinary people (factory hands, shop assistants, housewives), but are full of disarming optimism and fantasy. Bennett's characters have ambitions; they travel, they read, they dream. Apart from the Five Towns novels his best known works are two books originally written as magazineserials: The Card (about a bouncy young man whose japes outrage provincial society but who ends up as mayor) and The Grand Babylon Hotel, a set of linked stories about the guests and staff in a luxury hotel.

THE OLD WIVES' TALE  (1908) The lives of two sisters are contrasted: vivacious Sophia and steady Constance. Sophia feels constricted by life in the Five Towns, falls for a handsome wastrel and elopes with him to Paris, where he deserts her. Constance meanwhile marries a clerk in her father's shop, and settles to a life of bored domesticity. The novel charts the sisters' lives, and includes memorable scenes of the 1870 siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. Its concluding section unites the sisters, now elderly, and shows, as their lives draw to a close, that those lives were all they had, that neither achieved anything or made any impact on the world.

The Five Towns novels are Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, These Twain and The Roll Call. Riceyman Steps, set in London, is grimmer and more Zolaesque. Mr Prohack is an entertainment, a good follow-up to The Card. Of Bennett's many other writings, particularly fascinating are his Journals, discussing such matters as his love of France, the meals he ate, the plays and novels he enjoyed, and above all his phenomenal day-to-day productivity, and how much his work earned per week, per month, per year.

READ ON

Clayhanger

Riceyman Steps

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (is a set of stories about a US small town whose people's feelings and lives echo those of Bennett's characters) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica

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