Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Arnold Bennett was an English novelist who wrote widely and prolifically, authoring 34 novels, 13 plays, and seven volumes of short stories. His books sold well, and he was among the most financially successful novelists of his day.

He was born in Hanley in Staffordshire, an industrial area that was a center of ceramic production in England. This was the setting for many of his most celebrated novels; he fictionalized the area as The Five Towns. His family was socially modest but upwardly mobile. His father was a solicitor and planned for his son to follow in his footsteps. Bennett worked for his father and then, when he was 21, moved to a law firm in London. Subsequently, he worked as an assistant editor and then as editor of a women's magazine, taking the first steps in his career as a writer. He became a full-time author in 1900. A lifelong Francophile, he moved to Paris in 1903. He lived in France for 10 years and, in 1907, married a Frenchwoman. He moved back to England in 1912 and died of typhoid fever contracted from contaminated tap water in 1931.

Bennett believed literature should be accessible to ordinary people. He wrote his books for a wide audience, and they sold in huge numbers. Bennett was an adherent of realism, writing that the most important quality of literature was the faithful representation of life as it is. He was criticized by Modernist authors, including Woolf, who experimented with new styles of literary representation that they felt were more faithful to the changing society they lived in. Though successful in his lifetime, his fiction was neglected after his death, in part because of the Modernist’s backlash against his work.

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” discusses real figures from the world of art and culture, but another key figure is semifictional. Mrs. Brown is the name Woolf gives to an anonymous woman she met in a train carriage. While she was apparently a real person, she becomes a mercurial and ineffable literary character as Woolf demonstrates how different writers might have depicted her. Woolf describes the woman in the stream-of-consciousness style for which she would become famous, capturing impressions and thoughts as they pass through her mind. Woolf also depicts Mrs. Brown through the lens of other writers including an English novelist, a French novelist, and a Russian novelist, each of whom draws out different parts of Mrs. Brown’s character. Mrs. Brown exemplifies Woolf’s argument that character is complex and depends on context and interpretation.

Woolf refers to several Modernist or “Georgian” authors. These include E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Lytton Strachey.

E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist. His best-known works include the novels A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote short stories and essays and coauthored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Class was a key theme in his work. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was an Anglo American poet most famous for The Waste Land (1922), a long poem that makes copious use of quotations and other allusions to the literature of the past.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English writer of novels, poetry, and essays. His key themes include industrialization, modernity, and sexuality.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, most famous for Ulysses (1922), a novel that takes place on a single day and that experiments extensively with literary form.

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a biographer and member of the Bloomsbury Group. His most famous work, Eminent Victorians (1918), is an irreverent and witty group biography of four famous Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Charles Gordon.