Editing Arnold Bennett (section)

===First years in London===
[[File:Western side of Lincoln's Inn Fields.jpg|thumb|alt=urban streetscape with trees and grassed area to one side and terraced 18th century buildings on the other|upright=1|Lincoln's Inn Fields in 2018]]
In the solicitors' office in London, Bennett became friendly with a young colleague, John Eland, who had a passion for books. Eland's friendship helped alleviate Bennett's innate shyness, which was exacerbated by a lifelong stammer.<ref name=odnb/>{{refn|[[Somerset Maugham]], a friend of Bennett and a fellow-stammerer, observed, "It was painful to watch the struggle he sometimes had to get the words out. It was torture to him. Few realised the exhaustion it caused him to speak. What to most men is as easy as breathing was to him a constant strain.&nbsp;... Few knew the distressing sense it gave rise to of a bar to complete contact with other men. It may be that except for the stammer which forced him to introspection, Arnold would never have become a writer".<ref>Maugham, p. 192</ref>|group=n}} Together, they explored the world of literature. Among the writers who impressed and influenced Bennett were [[George Moore (novelist)|George Moore]], [[Émile Zola]], [[Honoré de Balzac]], [[Guy de Maupassant]], [[Gustave Flaubert]] and [[Ivan Turgenev]].<ref>Young, p. 8</ref> He continued his own writing, and won a prize of twenty [[guineas]] from ''[[Tit-Bits]]'' in 1893 for his story 'The Artist's Model'; another short story, 'A Letter Home', was submitted successfully to ''[[The Yellow Book]]'', where it featured in 1895 alongside contributions from [[Henry James]] and other well-known writers.<ref>Young, p. 9</ref>

In 1894 Bennett resigned from the law firm and became assistant editor of the magazine ''Woman''. The salary, £150 a year, was £50 less than he was earning as a clerk,{{refn|£150 in 1894 is approximately {{Inflation|UK|150|1894|fmt=eq|cursign=£|r=-3}}, according to calculations based on [[Consumer Price Index (United Kingdom)|Consumer Price Index]] measure of inflation.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Clark|first1=Gregory|title=The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New Series)|url=https://www.measuringworth.com/ukearncpi/|access-date=4 June 2020|publisher=MeasuringWorth|date=2020|archive-date=17 December 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171217054349/https://measuringworth.com/ukearncpi/|url-status=live}}</ref>|group=n}} but the post left him much more free time to write his first novel. For the magazine he wrote under a range of female pen-names such as "Barbara" and "Cecile". As his biographer [[Margaret Drabble]] puts it:
{{blockindent|He did a bit of everything. He learned about recipes and [[layette]]s, about making-up, making-ready and running-round. He reviewed plays and books&nbsp;... He acquainted himself with hundreds of subjects that would never have come his way otherwise&nbsp;... the domestic column told one "How to train a Cook", "How to keep parsley fresh", "How to make money at home", "How to bath the baby (Part One)". The knowledge was not wasted, for Bennett is one of the few novelists who can write with sympathy and detail about the domestic preoccupations of women.<ref>Drabble, p. 56</ref>|}}
The informal office life of the magazine suited Bennett, not least because it brought him into lively female company, and he began to be a little more relaxed with young women.<ref>Drabble, p. 57</ref> He continued work on his novel and wrote short stories and articles. He was modest about his literary talent: he wrote to a friend, "I have no inward assurance that I could ever do anything more than mediocre viewed strictly as art – very mediocre", but he knew he could "turn out things which would be read with zest, & about which the man in the street would say to friends 'Have you read so & so in the ''What-is-it''?{{'}}"<ref>Hepburn (2013), p. 11</ref> He was happy to write for popular journals like ''Hearth and Home'' or for the highbrow ''[[The Academy (periodical)|The Academy]]''.<ref>Drabble, p. 59</ref>

His debut novel, ''A Man from the North'', completed in 1896, was published two years later, by [[John Lane (publisher)|John Lane]], whose reader, [[John Buchan]], recommended it for publication.<ref>Drabble, p. 66</ref> It elicited a letter of praise from [[Joseph Conrad]] and was well and widely reviewed, but Bennett's profits from the sale of the book were less than the cost of having it typed.<ref>Young, p. 9; and Drabble, p. 78</ref>

In 1896 Bennett was promoted to be editor of ''Woman''; by then he had set his sights on a career as a full-time author, but he served as editor for four years.<ref name=odnb/> During that time he wrote two popular books, described by the critic [[John Lucas (poet)|John Lucas]] as "[[pot-boilers]]": ''Journalism for Women'' (1898) and ''Polite Farces for the Drawing Room'' (1899). He also began work on a second novel, ''[[Anna of the Five Towns]]'', the five towns being Bennett's lightly fictionalised version of the [[Staffordshire Potteries]], where he grew up.<ref name=ocel>Birch, Dinah (ed).  [https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-9780192806871-e-720. "Bennett, Arnold"], ''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'', Oxford University Press, 2009 {{subscription required}}</ref>