Arnold Bennett’s success made him loathed by other writers

Virginia Woolf admitted to her journal: ‘I haven’t that reality gift.’ Her contemporary Arnold Bennett had it in spades. He was a great novelist, as anyone who has read Riceyman’s Steps or the Clayhanger trilogy would attest. Being also the contemporary of Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence – you might say this was one of the reasons his reputation became obscured since those glory days of English fiction – he had fierce competition. Woolf’s snobbishness about him (see her lecture on ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’) did not help matters.

It was easy to be snobbish about Bennett, ‘The Man from the North’, to use the title of his first novel. The child of a self-made man, a solicitor from Stoke-on-Trent, he retained his local accent – that is, when an overpowering speech impediment allowed him to get out the words. Ezra Pound immortalised him as the vulgarian ‘Mr Nixon’ – ‘In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht’.