 First edition cover 1924 | |
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Vanessa Bell |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hogarth Press |
Publication date | 1924 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 24 pp. |
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity. It includes the famous observation by Woolf that, "on or about December 1910 human character changed." [1]
The writer Arnold Bennett had written a review of Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) in Cassell's Weekly in March 1923, [2] which provoked Woolf to rebut it. She recorded in her diary in June that Bennett accused her of writing about characters that couldn't survive. Her response was published in the United States in Nation and Athenaeum in December as Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. [2] The response encouraged her to develop her ideas of cultural relativism further. The following year she presented these ideas as a paper read to the Heretics Society [3] at Cambridge University on 18 May 1924. T.S. Eliot, then editor of The Criterion asked her for an article, and she submitted her talk, which was published in July under the title Character in Fiction [4] and then by the Hogarth Press on 30 October 1924 under its original title as No. 1 of the Hogarth Essays (1924–1926). [5] The cover was illustrated by Vanessa Bell. [6] [7]
Woolf addresses what she sees as the arrival of modernism, with the much cited phrase "on or about December, 1910, human character changed", referring to Roger Fry's exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. She argued that this in turn led to a change in human relations, and thence to change in "religion, conduct, politics, and literature". She envisaged modernism as inherently unstable, a society and culture in flux. She develops her argument through the examination of two generations of writers. Bennett was a critic of not just Woolf, but modern writers in general. In particular, he challenged modern writers' depiction of "reality". [7]
Woolf throws out a challenge to Bennett:
"Mr. Bennett says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?"
Her argument is that as times change, writers and the tools that they use must evolve, "the tools of one generation are useless to the next". She places Bennett in the Edwardians, and the subjects of his attacks as "Georgians" to reflect the change of monarch in 1910 that coincided with Fry's exhibition. She characterises Georgian writers in modernist terms as impressionistic, and those that are "telling the truth". [6]
Her vision of reality is captured in the world of an anonymous woman she has observed, to whom she gives the name "Mrs. Brown", whose world is to be reflected by modernist writers. [6]
Bell's modernist cover design shown here was used for the entire essay series, depicting a woman reading, with hair and clothing reflecting 1920s style. [6]
The essay has become a key element in the analysis of Woolf's work but also twentieth century literature in general. It eventually contributed to a decline in Bennett's reputation. [7] However critics such as John Carey have defended Bennett against Woolf's alleged snobbery, [8] while the novelist Philip Hensher recently described Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown as a "toxic but naïve essay about [Bennett’s] ingenious and well-made work" which "continues to mislead readers". [9]
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England.
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
(Helen) Hope Mirrlees was a British poet, novelist and translator. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, an influential fantasy novel, and for Paris: A Poem (1920), an experimental poem published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, which critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition."
Charles Kay Ogden was a British linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language. He is typically defined as a linguistic psychologist, and is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English.
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
The Hours, a 1998 novel by the American writer Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs Dalloway. Cunningham emulates elements of Woolf's writing style while revisiting some of her themes in different settings. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning, 2002, eponymous film.
Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new". This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth.
Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 20 October 1919. Set in Edwardian London, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives and romantic attachments of two acquaintances, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success.
This is a bibliography of works by the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).
The Mark on the Wall is the first published story by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1917 as part of the first collection of short stories written by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard Woolf, called Two Stories. It was later published in New York in 1921 as part of another collection entitled Monday or Tuesday.
Freshwater: A comedy is a play written and produced by Virginia Woolf in 1935, and the only play she wrote. Although only performed once in her lifetime, it has been translated into many languages and produced in many countries since. Alfred Lord Tennyson appears as a character in this play.
A Letter to a Young Poet was an epistolary novel by Virginia Woolf, written in 1932 to John Lehman, laying out her views on modern poetry.
Joan Adeney Easdale was an English poet from Sevenoaks, Kent. Her mother was the author Gladys Ellen Easdale, née Adeney (1875-1970). Her father, Robert Carse Easdale, left her mother during the First World War. Virginia Woolf discerned some "real merit" in her early work.
Paris: A Poem is a long poem by Hope Mirrlees, described as "modernism's lost masterpiece" by critic Julia Briggs. Mirrlees wrote the six-hundred-line poem in spring 1919. Although the title page of the first edition mistakenly has the year 1919, it was first published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Only 175 copies of the first edition were distributed. In 2011, the poem was reprinted in an edition of Mirrlees's Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, which helped create more critical interest.
The full text of Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown at Wikisource