Arnold Bennett, in many ways the most talked-of English author living, was born in Staffordshire in 1867 in a district known as "The Potteries," or "The Five Towns." Here are furnaces, collieries, manufactories and a people whose interests are made narrow and provincial by the restricted boundaries of their lives.
Bennett went to London, became a journalist, an essayist, an editor, a novelist, and a playwright. He lived for a time in Paris and traveled extensively, and he has made use of his varied experiences in his writings.
He has some remarkable books, long, careful, full of psychological problems. His Old Wives' Tale, Anna of the Five Towns and Clay-hanger all deal with the place and the people with which he was first familiar, and are graphic pictures of types. In Hilda Lessways he presents a study rather unlike those in his first books, and in Denry the Audacious and Buried Alive he has quite another manner and keener humor.
He is singularly direct and painstaking in his work, a master of realism. For sheer observation, says one critic, he is unequaled. Of late he has visited America and made a close and remarkably sympathetic study of our country, our cities, our manners.
Take up Bennett also as a playwright, and note the good work he has done in this field; contrast his plays with his earlier books. Read from Hilda Lessways and from the graphic description of the siege of Paris in the Old Wives' Tale, and also a descriptive chapter from the Five Towns. Compare his realistic work with that of Henry James, and note the differences. Quote from his little essay, How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day.
Clubs which wish programs for more than ten meetings may take in addition to the authors already suggested these others:
De Morgan: read Joseph Vance, Alice for Short, and An Affair of Dishonor. Conan Doyle: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The White Company. Eden Phillpotts: Knock at a Venture, The Port-reeve, The Secret Woman. A. E. W. Mason: Four Feathers, The Truants, Courtship of Morrice. Robert Hichens: The Garden of Allah, The Dweller on the Threshold. Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda, The Dolly Dialogues, Quisanté. Agnes and Egerton Castle: The Pride of Jennico, If Youth But Knew, The Secret Garden. E. F. Benson: The Challoners, An Act in a Backwater, The Luck of the Vails. May Sinclair: The Divine Fire, The Judgment of Eve. Mrs. Henry Dudeney: The Battle of the Weak, The Story of Susan.
Detailed criticisms and complete bibliographies of many novelists here mentioned may be found in Some English Story Tellers by F. T. Cooper (1912).