Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
Virginia Woolf
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
"Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" by Virginia Woolf is an essay published in 1924 that explores the arrival of modernism in literature. Written as a rebuttal to critic Arnold Bennett's dismissal of her work, Woolf argues that human character fundamentally changed around 1910, requiring writers to evolve their methods. She challenges Bennett's notion of "reality" in fiction, contrasting traditional Edwardian approaches with new Georgian sensibilities. Through the imagined figure of Mrs. Brown, Woolf defends modernist writing as impressionistic truth-telling for a transformed world.
About the book
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is Virginia Woolf's essay on what the novel owes to character, published by the Hogarth Press in 1924 after she first delivered it as a lecture in Cambridge. It began as a reply to the novelist Arnold Bennett, who had complained that the younger writers could not create characters who were real. Woolf answers with a scene: an elderly woman in a railway carriage, whom she calls Mrs Brown, and the question of how a novelist might capture her. She argues that the Edwardian writers Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy described houses, incomes and circumstances instead of people, and that the writers of her own generation had to break with those conventions to reach the person sitting in the corner.
About the author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist and essayist, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. She wrote novels that follow consciousness rather than plot — a day in a city, a decade passing in an empty house — and found a form for the way attention actually moves. With her husband Leonard she ran the Hogarth Press, which published her own books along with T. S. Eliot and the first English translations of Freud. Her work includes Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and the essay A Room of One's Own.