Editing Arnold Bennett (section)

===Novels and short stories===
[[File:Arnold Bennett 1928.jpg|thumb|upright|Bennett in 1928|alt=man in late middle age, dressed in a dark suit, full head of greying hair, moustached, sitting at a desk]]
The literary [[Literary modernism|modernists]] of his day deplored Bennett's books, and those of his well-known contemporaries [[H. G. Wells]] and [[John Galsworthy]].<ref name=h5/><ref>Steele, p. 21</ref> Of the three, Bennett drew the most opprobrium from modernists such as [[Virginia Woolf]], [[Ezra Pound]] and [[Wyndham Lewis]] who regarded him as representative of an outmoded and rival literary culture.<ref name=h5>Howarth, p. 5; and Drabble p. 289</ref> There was a strong element of class-consciousness and [[snobbery]] in the modernists' attitude:<ref>Carey, p. 162</ref> Woolf accused Bennett of having "a shopkeeper's view of literature" and in her essay "[[Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown]]" accused Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells of ushering in an "age when character disappeared or was mysteriously engulfed".<ref>Bishop, p. 137</ref>

In a 1963 study of Bennett, James Hepburn summed up and dissented from the prevailing views of the novels, listing three related evaluative positions taken individually or together by almost all Bennett's critics: that his Five Towns novels are generally superior to his other work, that he and his art declined after ''The Old Wives' Tale'' or ''Clayhanger'', and that there is a sharp and clear distinction between the good and bad novels.<ref>Hepburn (1963), p. 182</ref> Hepburn countered that one of the novels most frequently praised by literary critics is ''Riceyman Steps'' (1923) set in Clerkenwell, London, and dealing with material imagined rather than observed by the author.<ref>Hepburn (1963), p. 183</ref>{{refn|''Riceyman Steps'' won the [[James Tait Black Memorial Prize]] for fiction in 1923: winners in other years have included [[D. H. Lawrence]], [[E. M. Forster]], [[Radclyffe Hall]], [[Aldous Huxley]], [[Graham Greene]], [[Evelyn Waugh]], [[Anthony Powell]], [[Iris Murdoch]], [[John le Carré]], [[Zadie Smith]] and [[A. S. Byatt]].<ref>[https://www.ed.ac.uk/events/james-tait-black/winners/fiction "Fiction winners"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201104135357/https://www.ed.ac.uk/events/james-tait-black/winners/fiction |date=4 November 2020 }}, The James Tate Black Prizes, University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 6 June 2020</ref>|group=n}} On the third point he commented that although received wisdom was that ''The Old Wives' Tale'' and ''Clayhanger'' are good and ''Sacred and Profane Love'' and ''Lillian'' are bad, there was little consensus about which other Bennett novels were good, bad or indifferent.<ref>Hepburn (1963), pp. 189–190</ref> He instanced ''The Pretty Lady'' (1918), on which critical opinion ranged from "cheap and sensational"&nbsp;... "sentimental melodrama" to "a great novel".<ref>Hepburn (1963), pp. 132–133</ref> Lucas (2004) considers it "a much underrated study of England during the war years, especially in its sensitive feeling for the destructive frenzy that underlay much apparently good-hearted patriotism".<ref name=odnb/>

In 1974 [[Margaret Drabble]] published ''Arnold Bennett'', a literary biography. In the foreword she demurred at the critical dismissal of Bennett:
{{blockindent|I'd been brought up to believe that even his best books weren't very good – [[F. R. Leavis|Leavis]] dismisses him in a sentence or two, and not many people seemed to take him as seriously as I did. The best books I think are very fine indeed, on the highest level, deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never before encountered in fiction, but only in life.<ref>Drabble, p. xi</ref>|}}

Writing in the 1990s the literary critic [[John Carey (critic)|John Carey]] called for a reappraisal of Bennett in his book ''The Intellectuals and the Masses'' (1992):
{{blockindent|His writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals' case against the masses. He has never been popular with intellectuals as a result. Despite Margaret Drabble's forceful advocacy, his novels are still undervalued by literary academics, syllabus-devisers and other official censors.<ref>Carey, p. 152</ref>|}}
In 2006 Koenigsberger commented that one reason why Bennett's novels had been sidelined, apart from "the exponents of modernism who recoiled from his democratising aesthetic programme", was his attitude to gender. His books include the pronouncements "the average man has more intellectual power than the average woman" and "women as a sex love to be dominated"; Koenigsberger nevertheless praises Bennett's "sensitive and oft-praised portrayals of female figures in his fiction".<ref name=kk/>

Lucas concludes his study with the comment that Bennett's realism may be limited by his cautious assumption that things are as they are and will not change. Nevertheless, in Lucas's view, successive generations of reader have admired Bennett's best work, and future generations are certain to do so.<ref name=odnb/>