Leonora

Front matter

LE OwN*:O RA

A NOVEL

BY ARNOLD BENNETT

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE I. THE HOUSEHOLD AT HILLPORT . ° e e I II. MESHACH AND HANNAH . ° : ° ee 34 lil.7 THE CALL : : : 5 4 : - 60 Iv. AN INTIMACY . : : “ . . uoMnOT. Vv. THE CHANCE é F : : : : . 10 VI. COMIC OPERA ., “ ; ; : e Feu 143 VII. THE DEPARTURE . . - : 3 ° AES 51 VIII. THE DANCE - : A : ° . Be 4200 IX. A DEATH IN THE FAMILY . ° . ; .2033

XI. THE REFUSAL ; =o fads r ° : - 316 XII. IN LONDON : : . : . . EES CHURNET VALLEY BOOKS

1 King Street, Leek, Staffordshire ST13 5NW 01538 399033

Introduction

Leonora remains one of Arnold Bennett's best-kept literary secrets. In part this may be due to an accident of timing that saw it published in 1903, only twelve months after his first acknowledged masterpiece, Anna of the Five Towns, had appeared. Bennett himself may not have helped Leonora’s subsequent critical reception with his off-hand remarks contrasting the speed of its composition with the six years detailed research and conscientious re-drafting that went into Anna of the Five Towns. Writing in his Journal on 8th January 1904, Bennett boasts, ”... between April 1st and June 30th [1903] I wrote nearly all of ‘Leonora’”’ (Vol.1, 144). This very speed may, however, help account for the novel’s tightness of structure and thematic unity. Its intense concentrated evocation of the claustrophobic cultural and social life of the small provincial industrial town of Bennett’s youth (his novelistic Bursley is the Burslem Mother Town of the Potteries) flowed from his pen almost as a focussed reaction to the distancing effect of two months in 1903 spent travelling in Algeria. The result, in Leonora, is a novel that utilises a strong local sense of place to give a documentary realism to an exploration of gender differences and the growing demands of the New Woman for a role based on economic and social achievement as much as sexual affection.

The plot of Leonora is driven by Bennett’s trademark near obsession with the briefness of youth and sexual allure before the long decline and decay that leads to death. Many of Bennett’s male characters suffer a long textual decline before an often abrupt or brutal death - Mr Baines, in The Old Wives’ Tale

(1908), for example, lingers for fourteen years before sliding out of bed in an unguarded moment and dying of asphyxia - but it is Bennett’s women who bloom all too briefly before the realisation that death may be the only adventure left them.

The reader is introduced to Leonora on her fortieth birthday. At this point her major achievement in life is to have retained her beauty beyond the normal span. Yet this purely accidental gift of nature does not appear sufficient, for, “Even now, on her fortieth birthday, she still believed in the possibility of a conscious state of positive and continued happiness, and regretted that she should have missed it” (5). Now, the “arrival of this dire birthday, this day of wrath on which the proudest woman will kneel to implacable destiny and beg a reprieve” (5) had arrived with the realisation that she had achieved nothing beyond the commonplace and faced an uneventful future. Bennett had little doubt about the pivotal importance of Leonora’s fortieth birthday. Writing to Lucie Simpson in 1904, Bennett argued that not only was Leonora a better book than Anna of the Five Towns but that it probed deeper into the feminine psyche. He asserted that ”... women of forty, generally, do regret the past [and] ... long to be young again ... they are particularly, peculiarly, and specially passionate and prone to sexual excitement .... It was the discovery of these piquant truths which led me to write Leonora” (Letters Vol. 2, 187). In an addendum to the letter Bennett confidently asserts that “... there are only two things in this world really worth having - sexual love and the love of children”. These are precisely the values explored, against a materialistic background, within the structure of bourgeois marriage in Leonora.

This essential theme of ageing and death remained at the forefront of Bennett's consciousness throughout his writing career. It also surfaced in his non-fiction, most noticeably in Our Women. Chapters on the Sex Discord (1920), his contribution to the growing body of literature written in response to Feminism as a social, economic and political movement. In a chapter on “Wives, Money and Lost Youth”, a chapter title that succinctly summarises the three main concerns of Leonora, Bennett opines that whilst a “man dies only once. A woman dies twice”. With a coded reference to the imminence of the menopause, Bennett refers disturbingly to a “living Death” that “usually lasts for several years”. Whatever the conventionally perceived compensations for the loss of reproductive capacity, Bennett has no doubt that a psychological and physical life-changing event has occurred: “...There are compensations for Jill, it is said. The compensation of acquired wisdom. The compensation of calmer pulses. The compensation of children.” She is said to “live again in her children. And so on. Phrases! Phrases! Every age has its compensations - partial compensations. But for a woman there is no full and genuine compensation for the departure of beauty and freshness’(171). Little wonder then, that Bennett’s Leonora “would have forfeited all her experiences, her knowledge, and the charm of her maturity, to recover the irrecoverable!” (9)

Although reluctant to relinquish her hold over her three young daughters, Leonora is aware that without developing wider interests beyond the marketing of their sexual availability as potential lovers, wives and housekeepers, they face a future defined by physical and emotional atrophy. They must be helped to find the courage to escape the bourgeois respectability of their Hillport (Wolstanton) home and the neighbouring industrial squalor of Bursley. At moments of introspection Leonora “thought how commonplace, vulgar, and petty was the opulent existence within those tree-shaded villas, and that she was doomed to droop and die there, while her girls, still unfledged, might, if they had the sense to use their wings, fly away ...” (9)

The nest they were urged to fly is readily identifiable today as Moreton House, standing on the edge of Wolstanton Marsh: “The long garden front of the dignified eighteenth-century house, nearly the last villa in Hillport on the road to Oldcastle [Newcastle-under-Lyme] ...” (11) The house has been left to Leonora and its deeds are in her sole legal control. Both Leonora and her textual sister, Anna Tellwright in Anna of the Five Towns, may be read as women offering their respective partners attractions other than inherent sexuality. Leonora’s struggle to find the ideals of romance is, therefore, constantly qualified by the seductive qualities of money and economic security. The house may be “her domain, her kingdom, the beautiful and mellow creation of her intelligence” (288) but it is also her open prison, and not one she is willing to leave to ease her husband’s financial problems. Leonora and Anna also make interesting precursors to John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property, published in 1906, where economic capital also interacts with a developing feminism and the everyday struggle between continuity and change. It can be no accident that in the aesthetic and political climate of the time Bennett has John Stanway call his wife “Nora” in a suggestive echo of Ibsen’s heroine. The diminutive becomes particularly apparent at moments of financial embarrassment when he desperately needs to get his hands on this valuable and legally entailed doll’s house (123 and 288). Bennett had recognised the innovative nature of Ibsen’s portrayal of domestic sexual politics, and as early as 1899 he was writing to his friend John Rickard “I am doing an iv appreciation of Ibsen, an appreciation of Charlotte M. Yonge (imagine the contrast)” (Letters, Vol II, 123).

If Hillport represents the domestic site of conflict, then another extant local building, Bursley Old Town Hall, becomes the site for entry into a wider world of culture, entertainment and romance. Bennett uses the Bursley Amateur Operatic Society’s performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience as a textual mirror reflecting universal themes of sex and class: “Thus began, in Bursley Town Hall, a scene similar to the scenes which have rendered famous the historic stages of European capitals.” (161) Behind the glamorous images of the world of comic opera Bennett exploits the notion of performance as an ideological construct, a potential site for the mildly subversive exposure of the rigidities of the class structures in microcosm:

The front seats of the auditorium were filled with all that was dashing, and much that was solidly serious in Bursley. Hoarded wealth, whose religion was spotless kitchens and cash down, sat side by side with flightiness and the habit of living by credit . ... From the second seats the sterling middle classes, half envy and half disdain, examined the glittering ostentation in front of them; they had no illusions concerning it; their knowledge of financial realities was exact. Up in the gloom of the balcony the crowded faces of the unimportant and the obscure rose tier above tier to the organ loft. (148)

Millicent Stanway’s performance is clearly positioned within the specular economy. In order to seduce the male gaze she must make herself available as an object of vicarious sexual consumption. Hence, “she was rouged, her lips were painted, several times she had shown her knees” as an explicit invitation to “Look at me; enjoy me, as I enjoy your fervent glances; I am here to tickle your fancy” (159). Lest there remain any room for doubt about the ultimate aim of the staged performance, Bennett helpfully identifies sex and money as the driving forces behind Millicent’s display. “She was the eternal unashamed doll, who twists ‘men’ round her little finger, and smiles on them, always with an instinct for finance” (159). Leonora is perceptibly embarrassed by her youngest daughter “exploiting herself with unconstrained gestures and arch glances and twirlings of her short skirt” (158), without having sufficient objectivity to see that Millicent is performing in the public arena the role she herself performs on the domestic stage. It is precisely the “instinct for finance” that initially motivates Leonora’s attempt to ingratiate herself with her American admirer, Arthur Twemlow, to an extent that he will feel unable to disrupt her husband’s business, and, by implication, the capital base of her family life. As with Millicent’s performance, she acts with a “sudden rush of instinct”, using artful convention, “enmeshing him in the web of influences which she spun ceaselessly from the bright threads of her own individuality” (104).

Money indeed takes on its own reified role in the novel, making an important entrance into almost every chapter. At the story’s outset it takes precedence over sex in a young girl’s fancies: “They desired heaps of money .... they said to each other that they would do anything for money; and they repeated passionately, ‘anything’” (22). As long as “Money flowed through the house as usual” (208) Leonora’s romantic impulses remained damned by conventionality. Bennett, the social realist critic, is himself nudged into an authorial interpolation to show that he is aware of a sense of unease at obvious economic injustice even whilst allowing his characters to fatalistically accept the status quo. When a death in the family brings unearned financial reward to several characters, Bennett cannot let the moment pass without adding an ironic commentary inflected by that brand of Methodist symbolism prevalent throughout Bursley society: “Thus it is that providence watches over the wealthy, the luxurious, and the well-connected, and over the lilies of the field who toil not” (319). The author’s intervention is neatly placed in the textual ledger, drawing attention to a financial balance that draws little distinction between age and youth, production and display. Mr. Mayer, the works manager at Shawport pottery, could “never hope to earn more than three pounds a week” (318) after a lifetime in the business. Five pages later we learn that the eighteen-year-old Millicent, after only the briefest of exposure to the business of touring musical comedy, is expected to “sign a contract for a sixteen-weeks provincial tour at three pounds a week” (323). Such embedded ironic financial footnotes help prevent Bennett’s plot from succumbing to the cliche of melodrama. (Incidentally, the Shawport pottery is recognisable as another extant Burslem building from Bennett’s time. It is the Grade II listed Victorian Middleport Pottery of Burgess, Dorling and Leigh. John Stanway would still feel at home today in the Dickensian office with its original fixtures and fittings.)

Almost unique to the literature of the period, Bennett decides to introduce typographically real footnotes, as opposed to symbolic ones, into his text. All three footnotes address the translation of local Potteries dialect terms into standard English for a universal readership. Yet Bennett is extremely selective in his choice of terms for elucidation and the suspicion has to be that he is using a deliberate authorial metafictional device to enhance the realistic basis of his tale rather than satisfying any genuine need for information. Interestingly enough, he used the same device in Leonora’s sister-novel, Anna of the Five Towns, with four footnotes again positioned as an integral part of the text. That these factual disruptions to the text can cause a problem for modern editors may be adjudged from their fate in two recent critical editions of Anna. Margaret Harris’s 1995 edition for Oxford has removed Bennett’s footnotes from the novel and included them alongside her own general explanatory notes. Peter Preston’s 1997 edition for Dent restores them as Bennett intended as an integral part of the text. This present edition of Leonora also retains the footnotes where Bennett placed them since I argue that they serve his stated purpose in How To Become An Author “to effect his artistic purpose and to deceive the reader into an illusion of reality” (145). Bennett’s practical guide to aspiring authors was published in the same year as Leonora. It also had pertinent comments on another aspect of all his Five Towns novels, namely, dialect. “In the use of dialect the novelist should never even approach realistic exactitude .... To do so would be to irritate and confuse the reader” (145). In using footnotes to elucidate local dialect, Bennett may have confused editors more than readers.

Another device employed by Bennett to give additional verisimilitude to his attempt to create a realistic sense of place was intertextual reference to characters and events in other Five Towns novels and stories. By the time the last great Five Towns novel, These Twain, was published in 1916 numerous Bennett characters had re-appeared, either actively or as sources of reference, not only in the novels and stories but also in his many stage plays. In Leonora it is the unfortunate pottery manufacturer Titus Price who makes a _ posthumous appearance, recalling his suicide by hanging in Anna. The suicide, itself intertextually resurfacing at a moment when John Stanway’s financial difficulties are prompting thoughts of a similar drastic solution, also serves to reinforce the precarious nature of large parts of the pottery industry in the 1890s. Indeed, the argument may be made for reading the Five Towns novels and stories as case book studies of the socio-economic relationships embedded in the very specific sense of community as business places represented by the comparatively geographically and socially self-contained world of the pottery industry. Andrew Popp’s essay “’though it is but a promise’: Business Probity in Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns” (Seminar Paper, University of Birmingham, March 2005) makes precisely this point, “that Bennett's fiction both validates but also complicates our understanding of the relationship between society and economy, particularly in the highly localised regional economies that played such an important part in the British business system in the nineteenth century”.

In Leonora, it takes the reappearance of Arthur Twemlow in Bursley, after several years in America, to give a blunt business analysis of the Potteries’ prospects that local manufacturers were too insular to have anticipated and planned for. Twemlow warns his late father’s partner, John Stanway, that “... you are falling behind here .... You're getting left. Look how you're being cut out in cheap toilet stuff. In ten years you won't be shipping a hundred dollars’ worth per annum of cheap toilet to the States .... You in the Five Towns stick to old-fashioned methods” (96). Twemlow’s view of the district’s industrial prospects was not uncommon in the 1890s but it is noticeable that Bennett uses the voice of an outsider to contrast with the almost incestuous closed world of the pottery manufacturers. Stanway’s uncle Meschach counters Twemlow’s accusation of paralysis with an outburst of civic pride bounded by very limited horizons and mindful that change means expenditure: “We've got the steam-car. And we’ve got public baths. We wash ourselves nowadays. And there’s talk of a park, and a pond with a duck on it. We’re moving with the times, my lad, and so’s the rates.” Meschach espouses that brand of stoic fatalism so often associated with insular closed communities, reducing the adventure of life to a mere passage of survival. There is an uncanny resemblance between Pozzo’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot - “... one day we were born, one day we shall die ... They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” - and Meschach’s equally bleak view of life’s passage: “People living, and getting childer to worry ‘em, and dying. Nothing’ll cure ‘em of it seemingly” (48). There is no comfort to be had in thinking that different rules may apply in the wider world: “Is there anything different to that in New York? Or can they do without cemeteries?” (48) Meschach’s judgement that life is meaningless is implicit in all of Bennett’s major work. In itself, this view raises questions of the ontological and epistemological status of texts in general that goes well beyond the competence of Five Towns’ kitchen philosophers. Nevertheless, Meschach’s aside may be read as a succinct summation of Bennett’s world view, justifying Kinley E. Roby’s evaluation of Bennett as a progenitor of twentieth-century angst: “In taking such a view of the human experience, Bennett anticipated a major theme in English and American literature that came to maturity in the post-World War I years and has persisted into the present” (Writer at War, 16).

It is to escape this sense of Bursley as a mausoleum that Bennett presents Leonora’ s reawakening to love as the very possibility of movement out of stasis. The self-determined move into a wider socio-economic world by her two younger daughters reinforces the possibility of individualist butterflies hatching from the unpropitious chrysalis of a static Potteries environment. Rose’s achieving her ambition to train as a nurse at the New Female and Maternity Hospital in London itself gives birth to a number of critical responses. It stands in direct contradiction to the strand of criticism that mistakenly accuses all the women in Leonora of “languish[ing] in a world of inactivity, futility, decoration and consumption” (Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction. Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920, 206). One also doubts whether D.H. Lawrence had read Leonora when he chose nursing as the profession to help his heroine, Alvina Houghton, escape her background and deliver her kick against complacency. If he wrote The Lost Girl partly as his angry response to Anna of the Five Towns - “I hate Bennett’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery” (The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol. 1, 465) - then he did so without acknowledging that he had a sympathetic, if more restrained, model in Bennett’s Rose Stanway. Bennett uses the hospital setting to suggest that deprivation and misery are not restricted to provincial industrial districts but are universal in their effects. Rose may have escaped the “grime, squalor, servitude, ugliness” (3) of Bursley but she is conscious of the necessity for personal involvement to change conditions as opposed to her mother’s reluctant acceptance of a socially divisive “arrangement [that] seemed natural, necessary, inevitable” (4). Bennett’s picture of 1890s London, below, is reminiscent of passages from The Nether World of George Gissing, an author he much admired:

The approach to the hospital, through sombre squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated [Rose]. It appeared that she had entered the secret breeding-quarter of the immense city, the obscene district where misery teemed and generated, and where the revolting fecundity of nature was proved amid surroundings of horror and despair. And the hospital itself was the very centre, the innermost temple of all this ceaseless parturition. (346)

Against this setting Rose Stanway may be read as one of that breed of New Women determined to impose themselves upon, and change, their environment. This depiction of “fecundity of nature” and “horror and despair” links Bennett not only to Gissing but also to Joseph Conrad of The Heart of Darkness and Thomas Hardy of Jude the Obscure. Whatever its localised setting as a Five Towns novel, Leonora is not a provincial text in its ideological scope.

For, finally, whatever its deeply ingrained and uncomfortable message of the brevity of beauty and the inevitability of death and decay, Leonora is, at heart, a love story. Chapter 10, “In the Garden” sees Bennett exploring Leonora’s acceptance of a second love through the awakening and development of her consciousness. Here Bennett’s imaginative sympathy is displayed as he inhabits the feminine in describing an event that has very little physical action - the touching of hands, a glance - but which is charged with emotional tension, so that the seemingly unromantic industrial landscape becomes charged with meaning:

And with the feel of the grass under her feet, and the soft clouds overhead, and the patient trees, and the glare in the southern smoke, and the lamps of Bursley, and the solitary red signal in the valley, she breathed out her spirit like an aerial essence, and merged into unity with him. And the strange far-off noises of nocturnal industry wandered faintly across the void and seemed fraught with a mysterious significance. (299)

Writing to Wells in 1897 Bennett sets out an early personal credo on the romance of materialism in the neglected regions of England:

It seems to me that there are immense possibilities in the very romance of manufacture - not romance of machinery and that sort of stuff - but in the tremendous altercation with nature that is continually going on - and in various other matters. I am quite sure there is an aspect of these industrial districts which is really grandiose, full of dark splendours, and which has been absolutely missed by all novelists up to date ... (Letters Vol II, 90)

Peter Preston writes of Bennett’s ”... characters’ ignorance of the staple industry, and the extent to which they are able to overcome that ignorance and share his own enlarged vision [as] critical elements of the drama of both Anna of the Five Towns and Clayhanger” (Geography and Literature, 34). The same argument applies to Leonora, where in likewise fashion Leonora and her daughters act to express this “enlarged vision” without understanding the material nature of their being. The garden is, perhaps, one of the few textual spaces in Bennett uncorrupted by industry, religion and sexual politics. (Bennett’s garden as signifier becomes fully cultivated in 1924 with the appearance of Elsie and the Child.) It is in her garden that sense and setting become one for Leonora, just as Bennett creates a single essence out of nature - “the patient trees” - and the industrial landscape. In finding love in middle age Leonora is made aware of the feelings of youth and is able to let her children go. This is another kind of love, but one that Bennett handles with the maturity of the sympathetic novelist only too aware of the cramped humanity of his heroine.

Almost without exception contemporary critics have relegated Leonora to the margins when discussing Bennett's work. This is unfortunate, not only because it has, as argued above, considerable merits on its own account, but also because to ignore it unbalances any discussion of Bennett’s achievement in creating a sense of place that depends upon a unity of vision across the Five Towns novels and stories. Even a light entertainment such as Helen With The High Hand has its place in completing the literary jigsaw that is Bennett’s Bursley - the opening depiction of Bursley park (7-9), for example, complements the park scene in Anna of the Five Towns and completes the picture of a park that is still in the planning stages in Leonora (49). Leonora is the second volume of a trilogy of Five Towns novels, Anna of the Five Towns, Leonora and Sacred and Profane Love, that together explore a range of feminine responses to love, tragedy and death. Their respective heroines, Anna, Leonora and Carlotta are all very different types of women from different backgrounds and with different aspirations, but all united in having their characters formed by the Potteries. All three women are textually liberated by a post-Victorian frankness in writing about the female body and its craving for sexual fulfilment. Nancy C. Paxton makes the under-explored, but critically pertinent, comment that “[w]hile this greater freedom has often been claimed as a unique sign of literary modernism in, for example, Wyndham Lewis or T. S. Eliot, similar inscriptions of embodiment, sexuality and desire can be found in Arnold Bennett's treatment of his heroine’s body in Anna of the Five Towns ...” (Outside Modernism. In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900-30, 15). What is true of Anna is equally applicable to Leonora. John Lucas is one of the few critics who have recognised the literary merit of Leonora. His Arnold xiv

Bennett. A Study of his Fiction devotes seven pages to elucidating its values. Lucas is particularly good at locating Leonora in the context of contemporary novels and it is worth quoting him on this relationship since he helps to make a strong case for returning Leonora to the company of her literary peers:

Bennett ... is much more conscious than either [Wells] or [Forster] of the complex tangle of claims and relationships that enmesh people. There is a real weightiness of social reality in Leonora that both A Room with a View and Ann Veronica manage without. This is not to criticise. I admire both novels. But the fact is that Bennett can do things that Wells and Forster can’t. Above all, he is unerring in the way he renders Leonora’s sense of being confusedly in love with and contemptuous of her husband .... One of the facts about Bennett which any critic must bow to is that it is the entire presentation of events and characters which makes them so good. His best work gets it wonderful concreteness and air of reality (to borrow James’s phrase) from the slow accumulation of incident and gradual revelation of individual lives and relationships. (67)

In placing Bennett’s novel alongside that of Wells and Forster, Lucas is only resurrecting the response of critical commentaries when the book was first published. Wilfred Whitten, writing in the journal T. P.’s Weekly in November 1903, was in little doubt as to Leonora’s stature:

In his realism this author has gone to life itself for the answers to his enigmas. In his desire to create men and women he has not been put off with a show of puppets. His claim as an artist is drawn from the source of all art - life itself. And from the standpoint of art it is significant that one naturally refers this book, not to the fleeting factions of the circulating library, but to the great standards themselves - to

Tolstoy, to Flaubert, to Thomas Hardy. (James Hepburn, Arnold Bennett. The Critical Heritage, 178)

Bennett has too often been relegated to the margins of theoretical literary discourse, either because of a modernist driven disdain for its own ill-defined Edwardianism, or because of a wider critical neglect and misunderstanding of the widespread nature of the early twentieth century English provincial experience. New editions of his work may encourage the unprejudiced reader to approach such novels as Leonora for their innovative exploration of issues such as gender, cosmopolitanism, property, commodification and display. The extent of the critical literary-aesthetic journey to be undertaken is indicated by Bennett’s chapter headings taking his characters from the tightly defined “The Household at Hillport” (Chapter I) to the culturally unbounded “In London” (Chapter XII). Freed from a restricted reading of the plot as a mere provincial romantic melodramatic period piece of passing interest, these issues assume a dynamic status that helps define wider contemporary issues of cultural meaning. A hundred years on from Whitten’s high praise and thirty years since Lucas briefly illuminated Leonora’s several literary virtues, it is perhaps time to re-read and re-evaluate the neglected works of an author who evoked and championed the idea of the feminine in a context central to the development of the twentieth-century novel.

John Shapcott Chairman, Arnold Bennett Society

(I would like to thank Assistant Professor of English Kurt

Koenigsberger for his perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this Introduction.)

FURTHER READING The books listed below provide a guide to Arnold Bennett's life and his prolific output. Unfortunately, however, interesting criticism of Leonora is comparatively rare, with the exception of J.B. Simons in 1936 and John Lucas in 1974. Robert Squillace’s book, whilst almost silent on Leonora, does extend the critical boundaries of Bennett scholarship. Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton’s Outside Modernism provides a useful background for setting Bennett’s work within the development of the early twentieth-century novel. BIOGRAPHY Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974. Flower, Newman, ed. The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 3 vols. London: Cassell, 1932-3 Hepburn, James, ed. The Letters of Arnold Bennett, 4 vols. Oxford: O.U.P., 1966,