Bennett was born in Hanley in the Potteries, the son of a solicitor. In 1888 he went to London as a solicitor's clerk, a profession he soon abandoned for the more congenial job of journalist. He became assistant editor (1893), then editor (1896–1900), of the journal Woman and also experimented with narrative prose; The Grand Babylon Hotel and Anna of the Five Towns, novels widely different in their styles, were published almost simultaneously in 1902.

An imitation that no one can distinguish from the original is naturally as good as the original" - or is it? Bennett, Arnold (1974). Andrew Mylett (ed.). Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years – "Books and Persons" 1926–1931. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0-70-111851-8. The Lion's Share; The Baby's Bath; The Silent Brothers; The Nineteenth Hat; Vera's First Christmas Adventure; The Murder of the Mandarin; Vera’s Second Christmas Adventure; The Burglary; The News of the Engagement; Beginning the New Year; From one Generation to Another; The Death of Simon Fuge; In a New BottleThe one thing that doesn’t surprise about this book, then, is the revelation that the passionate, impetuous Sophia has lived almost exactly the same life as Constance, who married the draper’s assistant, had a son and stayed in the house she was born in all her life. For Sophia, living through the siege of Paris and the Commune “meant chiefly that prices went down”. There is some irony in that observation, but it is not harsh or bitter. That, says Bennett, is what it is to be human. Thisimage istaken from the props loan book of 1991/2. Itshows how great was the attention to historical accuracy in this dramatized version of Bennett’s novel. Clayhanger is a saga story rather than a reflection of the conditions of England at the time. It tells the story of the Clayhanger family as (over time) they leave humble beginnings in the workhouse to become analderman and other middle class professions that were highly aspirational to the first generations of the family. Maggie shows the plight of many women of the time, who were trapped by economic dependence in caring for first her father and then her brother, protagonist Edwin. The series is often referred to as a trilogy, but the first 3 novels were published as one volume and there are actually 4 novels in the series: Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, These Twain and The Roll-Call.

Anna of the Five Towns: BBC 1985 – four-part dramatisation by John Harvey, with Lynsey Beauchamp, Emrys James, Peter Davison, Anton Lesser and Anna Cropper

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What is delivered is a fun story with fun characters and lots of humor. The humor is sometimes satirical, sometimes ironical, sometimes simply laugh out loud funny. It is good natured. It pokes fun at art, doctors, social class, the judiciary system, introversion versus extroversion and yes, love!

Arnold Bennett Collection". Archived from the original on 14 June 2021 . Retrieved 20 February 2021. In 1923-24, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf engaged in a literary debate on the modern novel. Poor Bennett fared no better than in his earlier exchange with George Bernard Shaw on the nature of dramaturgy. In her 1924 essay, "Mr, Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Woolf did not recoil at Bennett's criticism of her modernist and experimental challenge to the novel. For her, Bennett's writings presented artificial characters in which the excessive pedantic details of description and place obscured the creation of believable personages. The sometimes stale and exhausted form of the novels of Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett were successfully challenged and largely undermined by Woolf and others. While the former two have survived to a limited extent among some current readers (and non-Derridean professors), Bennett has been largely neglected. Sadly, even his masterpiece, THE OLD WIVES TALE, with its evocative tale of two very different sisters over a 70-year period set in Stoke-on-Trent and Paris and encompassing a Up in the corners of the ceiling, obscure in the eclipse of the cardboard shade, was a complicated system of cobwebs." In his last hours the local authority agreed that straw should be spread in the street outside Bennett's flat to dull the sound of traffic. This is believed to be the last time this traditional practice was carried out in London. [66]This is the side to Bennett’s writing that I find curiously uplifting, despite the apparent fatalism of the plot: the tenderness with which he recognises that our families, upbringing and environment imprint us for life. We can rage against it, like Sophia (or Bennett himself, who left the Potteries as a young man and never lived there again), but it will always be visible in the intimate tiny details he catalogues, like this moment, when he describes Sophia recoiling from the execution above: Rosen, Carole (1994). The Goossens: A Musical Century. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 978-1-55-553210-9. The literary modernists of his day deplored Bennett's books, and those of his well-known contemporaries H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy. [133] [134] Of the three, Bennett drew the most opprobrium from modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis who regarded him as representative of an outmoded and rival literary culture. [133] There was a strong element of class-consciousness and snobbery in the modernists' attitude: [135] Woolf accused Bennett of having "a shopkeeper's view of literature" and in her essay " Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" accused Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells of ushering in an "age when character disappeared or was mysteriously engulfed". [136] 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. [37] Drabble comments that Bennett was well rid of her, but it was a painful episode in his life. [38] In early 1907 he met Marguerite Soulié (1874–1960), who soon became first a friend and then a lover. [39] 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. [40] The marriage was childless. [41] Early in 1908 the couple moved from the rue d'Aumale to the Villa des Néfliers in Fontainebleau-Avon, about 40 miles (64km) south-east of Paris. [42] [n 4]