{"id":14152,"date":"2022-09-21T13:55:46","date_gmt":"2022-09-21T11:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=14152"},"modified":"2023-10-03T11:43:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-03T09:43:08","slug":"the-bennett-of-bennett-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=14152","title":{"rendered":"The Bennett of Bennett & Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Following from my previous post<\/a>, if you get another shot at The Spectator<\/em>, A.N. Wilson also had something to say<\/a> earlier in the year on Arnold Bennett and a new biography by Patrick Donovan called Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon<\/em> (Unicorn)<\/a> which couldn’t help but interest me.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
pub. Unicorn (2022)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Now for me, Bennett is only the Bennett of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown<\/a><\/em>; that essay from a certain Mrs. Woolf that is the wryly imagined culmination of the legendary dispute between herself and the aforesaid, and is a proxy – so to speak – for that greater reckoning between proponents of realism and modernism in the early 2oth century novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a little snarky when it comes to Mrs. Woolf, in my opinion, is the Mr. Wilson. Nor quite accurate either. Bennett and Woolf were contemporaries only up to a point, more precisely their careers briefly overlapped; most of Bennett’s works (including the “Clayhanger” series) were published in the first two decades of the century, and Mr. Bennett’s criticism of Mrs. Woolf’s third novel Jacob’s Room<\/em> came in 1922 and before her real rise to literary fame with Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>. And Wilson’s claim that she (and others) had it in for Bennett because he was too “middle-brow” is rather specious. On the contrary, one could contend; it was Mrs. Woolf’s “Mrs Brown” who displayed various degrees of the too easily maligned “middle-brow” – Mrs. Woolf is rooting for the “middle-brow” with all their peculiarities and inconsistencies and against easy assumptions made of them. Her point is: if it were to be a “Mr. Bennett” who was to imagine and describe his<\/em> “Mrs Brown”, he<\/em> would have her been imbued in his<\/em> own image, reflecting the world as he<\/em> saw it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do understand Mr. Wilson’s loyalties towards Mr. Bennett – the links between the two men: Stoke-on-Trent, potteries, Wedgwood<\/a> are clear. And Clayhanger<\/a><\/em> and The Potter’s Hand<\/a><\/em> stand only a century apart in the setting and a (different) century in the writing of; neither of which I have read, but am inclined to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following from my previous post, if you get another shot at The Spectator, A.N. Wilson also had something to say earlier in the year on Arnold Bennett and a new biography by Patrick Donovan called Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon (Unicorn) which couldn’t help but interest me. Now for me, Bennett is only the Bennett of … Continue reading “The Bennett of Bennett & Brown”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,149,22],"tags":[27,448,136],"class_list":["post-14152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literature","category-virginia-woolf","tag-a-n-wilson","tag-arnold-bennett","tag-virginia-woolf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14152"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16980,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14152\/revisions\/16980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}