Books and Persons; Being Comments on a Past Epoch, 1908-1911

Arnold Bennett was a novelist who took criticism personally. This collection of essays, written for a weekly periodical between 1908 and 1911 and gathered here with sharp retrospective commentary, finds one of Edwardian England's most accomplished fiction writers skewering the literary establishment with bracing ferocity. Bennett pauses to honor the work of critic Wilfred Whitten, but his real passion is mounting a defence of genuine prose against the tide of mediocrity that he saw swelling around him. Here is a writer irritated by publishers who chase profit over art, annoyed by readers who prefer sensation to substance, and utterly unwilling to compromise his standards. The essays pulse with a novelist's love for the craft of sentences, for the weight of carefully chosen words. Reading these pages is like sitting in a London club around 1910, listening to a man who helped shape modern English literature explain exactly what's wrong with the literary culture of his moment. Bennett wrote these pieces as the old world was about to shatter, and there's something poignant in his conviction that literature's survival was the pressing question of the day. For anyone curious about what serious writers thought about their craft a century ago, this is an intimate, irascible, and surprisingly timely portrait.