B ennett, A rnold

Enoch Arnold Bennett (May 27, 1867‐March 27, 1931) was a British novelist, critic, essayist, and playwright. He was born in the town of Hanley, Staffordshire, in the heart of the “Potteries” district of northern England – a region so named for its industrial character and preeminence in the making of ceramics. This area was immortalized by Bennett as the “Five Towns” of his best‐known works, which include the novels Anna of the Five Towns (1902a), The Old Wives' Tale (1908b), Clayhanger (1910a), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916), along with numerous short stories. His representations of life in the region in which he grew up were largely influenced by the naturalism of the French writers who inspired Bennett, most notably Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers. Bennett was educated in local schools and raised in the Wesleyan Methodist tradition. His father qualified as a solicitor late in life, having previously worked as a potter and a schoolmaster. As an adolescent, Arnold, the eldest of the Bennetts six children, worked in his father's office. Bennett would later use the knowledge he gained from this apprenticeship to create vivid portraits of solicitors in works like Whom God Hath Joined (1906), a novel which traces two divorce cases through the courts. The fixation on parent‐child relationships in Bennett's work, and on the tyranny of overbearing fathers in particular, has been frequently noted. So too has the concern with – and genuine feeling for – the mundane details of everyday life, which characterizes Bennett's particular strain of realism, and clearly differentiates him from his high modernist contemporaries and successors.