Since I have read and enjoyed Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, I must push back on Woolf's claim that Bennett does not sufficiently capture the stuff of life and the potential of fiction. TOWT remains delightful and an interesting counterpart to Modernism; it is fascinating to read something with such strong command of nineteenth-century style; despite being representative of more conservative literary efforts in its era, the novel has a self-aware playfulness on occasion that indicates adjacency to shifting literary landscape. to the s Buy it! Read it! Be a shameless materialist like me.
Since I have read and enjoyed Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, I must push back on Woolf's claim that Bennett does not sufficiently capture the stuff of life and the potential of fiction. TOWT remains delightful and an interesting counterpart to Modernism; it is fascinating to read something with such strong command of nineteenth-century style; despite being representative of more conservative literary efforts in its era, the novel has a self-aware playfulness on occasion that indicates adjacency to shifting literary landscape. to the s Buy it! Read it! Be a shameless materialist like me.