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The Pretty Lady
This fascinating novel from author Arnold Bennett gives readers a glimpse into gender roles and social classes at the dawn of the twentieth century. Switching between the perspectives of two distinctly different narrators, The Pretty Lady is a closely observed portrait of a turbulent time.
Audio Cassette
First published January 1, 1918
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About the author
Arnold Bennett
995 books313 followersEnoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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January 7, 2026If F. Scott Fitzgerald says to read it, I read it: https://www.listchallenges.com/f-scot...
Unannotated Book in F. Scott Fitzgerald's College of One
Unannotated Book in F. Scott Fitzgerald's College of One
April 29, 2012
I must admit I loved this book. But I wonder why? Perhaps because it seems so sly to me. It starts off firmly in the nineteenth century as the story of a courtesan, taken from her point of view. Well, no wonder. Bennett lived in Paris and stories of courtesans were de rigeur. But then it becomes the story of a stuffy uptight prig and most of the book is from his point of view. He is superior and condescending, though conscientious, and very very conservative and sexist. But he is peripherally involved with some society women, women of life vitality and contradiction, women who fascinate, repulse and engage our hero -- at the same time as he never stops feeling infinitely superior to them. The novel takes place in London in WW1 and by the end we've had a glimpse of the coming jazz age and the death of the last vestiges of Edwardian England. I'm pretty sure I don't speak for the common taste but.... The best book I've read this year.
March 9, 2015
Quite an interesting book. Sometimes difficult to focus on (it was a Librivox audiobook), probably because of the variety of characters.
I read this article, which cast an interesting light on the intentions of Arnold Bennett and helped me understand some of the issues raised.
Well done, Simon Evers on the reading.
I read this article, which cast an interesting light on the intentions of Arnold Bennett and helped me understand some of the issues raised.
Well done, Simon Evers on the reading.
August 31, 2018
Smug, smart satire about well-off British civilians during WWI.
G. J. Hoape is fifty, rich and well-connected. He begins an affair with a superior French cocotte named Christine Dubois, stranded in London during the hostilities.
At the same time he consorts with two fascinating but infuriating society women, Concepción and Queenie who, like him, try to be of use to the war effort within the limits of their superfluous abilities.
These efforts include planning pretentious pageants for the benefit of wounded soldiers, working on committees and in munitions factories, or gadding about on their roofs during air raids in order to feel daring.
There's something terribly self-satisfied about G. J., just as there was about Bennett himself. Hoape pretty much has his cake and date it, condescending everyone along the way. And yet all the other characters are so inordinately fond of him.
That said, there's also a weary, cynical tone to the novel, an acceptance that all these people are useless in war time, perhaps all the time. This description of a committee meeting is particularly honest and damning:
'The new member was a little discouraged. He had the illusion that the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem as it was presented—the drains (postponed), the repairs to the motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence, the cost per day per patient, the relations with the French civil authorities and the French military authorities, the appointment of a new matron who could keep the peace with the senior doctor, and the great principle involved in deducting five francs fifty centimes for excess luggage from a nurse's account for travelling expenses—each problem helped to demonstrate that the hospitals did exist and that men and women were toiling therein, and that French soldiers in grave need were being magnificently cared for and even saved from death. And it was plain, too, that none of these excellent things could have come to pass or could continue to occur if the committee did not regularly sit round the table and at short intervals perform the rite of raising hands....'
More damning still, the committee only give their full attention to the agenda when the discussion turns to a potential scandal arising from the propinquity of doctors and nurses.
G. J. Hoape is fifty, rich and well-connected. He begins an affair with a superior French cocotte named Christine Dubois, stranded in London during the hostilities.
At the same time he consorts with two fascinating but infuriating society women, Concepción and Queenie who, like him, try to be of use to the war effort within the limits of their superfluous abilities.
These efforts include planning pretentious pageants for the benefit of wounded soldiers, working on committees and in munitions factories, or gadding about on their roofs during air raids in order to feel daring.
There's something terribly self-satisfied about G. J., just as there was about Bennett himself. Hoape pretty much has his cake and date it, condescending everyone along the way. And yet all the other characters are so inordinately fond of him.
That said, there's also a weary, cynical tone to the novel, an acceptance that all these people are useless in war time, perhaps all the time. This description of a committee meeting is particularly honest and damning:
'The new member was a little discouraged. He had the illusion that the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem as it was presented—the drains (postponed), the repairs to the motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence, the cost per day per patient, the relations with the French civil authorities and the French military authorities, the appointment of a new matron who could keep the peace with the senior doctor, and the great principle involved in deducting five francs fifty centimes for excess luggage from a nurse's account for travelling expenses—each problem helped to demonstrate that the hospitals did exist and that men and women were toiling therein, and that French soldiers in grave need were being magnificently cared for and even saved from death. And it was plain, too, that none of these excellent things could have come to pass or could continue to occur if the committee did not regularly sit round the table and at short intervals perform the rite of raising hands....'
More damning still, the committee only give their full attention to the agenda when the discussion turns to a potential scandal arising from the propinquity of doctors and nurses.
April 19, 2014
Fascinating portrayal of London life during WW1 and I think a good insight based on Bennett's life experiences with courtesans and running the French propaganda unit for the British government. He is scathing about the vanity and hypocrisy of the upper classes and their war effort with acerbic little observations: the society ladies who wears imitation medals made out of diamonds and put on expensive& elaborately costumed pageants, instead of just giving from their considerable fortunes.
As ever the power of Bennett's writing is in the sympathetic and journalistic description of a real society and time and place. Of what it felt like to be caught in Zeppelin bombing raids. There are tiny flashes of terrible violence - a child's severed arm in the rubble; the death of a Clyde munitions factory girl caught up in machinery. And there's a real attempt to understand the mind of the eponymous pretty lady, Christine with her strange superstitions. I love the
ambition of this novel.
As ever the power of Bennett's writing is in the sympathetic and journalistic description of a real society and time and place. Of what it felt like to be caught in Zeppelin bombing raids. There are tiny flashes of terrible violence - a child's severed arm in the rubble; the death of a Clyde munitions factory girl caught up in machinery. And there's a real attempt to understand the mind of the eponymous pretty lady, Christine with her strange superstitions. I love the
ambition of this novel.
January 15, 2016
A French courtesan in England is the protagonist but a wealthy 50-ish man Hoape is the more interesting character, through introspection, trauma, and the war. A host of characters parade through the novel, some briefly and others linger, all to serve as a way for Hoape to understand human nature and his role in his community. The end caught me by surprise, bittersweet but perfectly in line with the story.
September 30, 2020
Arnold Bennett was a wondefully readable writer. There isn't a word in the wrong place. The evocation of wartime London is better than any other I can think of, partly I think because it is incidental to his telling of the story. The ending is quite a jolt but on reflection fits perfectly.
January 13, 2019
A really beautiful novel and strangely ignored in comparison to Bennett's other works!
January 24, 2026
A French businesswoman (re: courtesan) who is quite a sophisticate, unapologeticly sets up "shop" in England shortly after the war, and does her best with her circumstances.
Bennett tells the story, brilliantly as ever.
https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com...
Bennett tells the story, brilliantly as ever.
https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews