MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN

by Virginia Woolf

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is a 1923 essay by Virginia Woolf. There are at least two central features that “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” shares with texts like “Modern Fiction”; first, there is the shared concern with representation, and especially representation of character; and second, this concern is almost always explored with respect to the literary practices of Edwardian writers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Classics, School, British Literature, Writing, Literary Criticism

26 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Chavelli Sulikowska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another instructive and insightful short novel from the mastermind. This time Woolf enlightens us on the importance of sound characterisation in writing. I feel she should have penned ‘Novel Writing for Idiots – 101’ – it would be on all the curriculum!

Applauding the Victorians, she laments the demise of character study that she considered plagues the Edwardian writers – notably, those writing at the turn of last century (quite definitively she notes that 1910 was a particularly ‘bad year’ for this!) – a bunch of well known authors whose writing seemed to fail Woolf like a blighted crop of corn.

While she admits the ‘ravishing beauty’ of Eliot’s lines, she regrets that in reading his work she ‘must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next line…like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar…’ she confesses a desire in such moments for the ‘old decorum’s and indolence’ of her predecessors, who ‘instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book.”

Most importantly, Woolf notes that the writer is never alone. ‘There is always the public with him. If not in the same seat, at least in the compartment next door! Now the public is a strange travelling companion…” For Woolf, the Victorians such as Sterne and Austen wrote novels that were self-contained and ‘complete in itself….the only thing left wanting in Pride and Prejudice was to read it again!’ She goes on, noting that there is ‘hardly any subject of human experience left out of War and Peace…” – you would certainly hope not after so many pages! We love such classics for their richness, memorable characters and storyline.

The Edwardians are on the other hand, remembered for their frustrating complexity, ambiguity, staccato language and general shunting of meaning – for which we as readers are forced to seek, if there is any meaning to find. No spoon feeding! While this lends itself to literary gymnastic exercise for us readers, it can get tiring ….sometimes all we want is guiltily a bit of reading pleasure and an excuse to be lazy!

[Rakhi Dalal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf is mesmerizing as a novelist and as a critic she is delightedly charged with words which convey her ideas in remarkably simple language. Considered as one of the modernist writers, she has given due thought to the art of writing and character depiction in “Modern fiction”. Her essays, Modern fiction(1925), Character in fiction( 1924) and Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown( 1923), deal with more or less the same ideas; how to represent character in fiction. And she wonders if modern writers have learnt well enough of the art of writing.

It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle.[Modern Fiction]

In the essay Modern fiction, she is quite critical of the writings of Edwardian writers like Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy and labels them as materialists, describing their works as disappointing. In Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, she says that they were the most prominent and successful writers in the year 1910. Considering the sheer volume of their work, she observes that they embody an imperfection which takes life away from their works. She is of the opinion that young writers cannot learn anything about writing from these writers. Her words are humorously satirical when she considers how the experience of learning from these writers would be like.

Now it seems to me that to go to these men and ask them to teach you how to write a novel—how to create characters that are real—is precisely like going to a bootmaker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch. Do not let me give you the impression that I do not admire and enjoy their books. They seem to me of great value, and indeed of great necessity. There are seasons when it is more important to have boots than to have watches. To drop metaphor, I think that after the creative activity of the Victorian age it was quite necessary, not only for literature but for life, that someone should write the books that Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have written. Yet what odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque. That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished ; it can be put upon the shelf, and need never be read again.[Modern Fiction]

Of the three, she is most critical of Bennett and the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” concentrates upon Bennett’s take upon a fictional character, Mrs. Brown, bearing in mind Bennett’s usual description of characters in his novels.

She begins by telling us an anecdote about an old lady, say, Mrs. Brown whom she met on a journey from Richmond to Waterloo. She tells us about Mrs. Brown’s dialogue with a gentleman seated with her and then she proceeds to tell us what she imagines about her. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments: sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband's medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals out of saucers, indulging in long, silent stares.

And while describing how Mr. Bennett would depict the character, Woolf begins with two assertions:
1. Everyone is a judge of character.
2. On or about December 1910, human character changed.

For her second assertion she says – “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.”*

For her first assertion she begins by saying that everyone, in life, is a judge of character, because one inevitably indulges in character reading when coming across other individuals. And a novelist is different in the sense that he doesn’t cease to be interested in a character even when he has learnt enough about the character. But how would Mr. Bennett see a fictional character like Mrs. Brown, a poorly dressed and small woman having an anxious look, who is travelling form Richmond to Waterloo?

While she thinks that Mr. Wells, a proponent for Utopia, will observe her in the manner she ought to be and not as she is, for he forgets that there are no Mrs. Browns in Utopia, Mr. Galsworthy would only see in Mrs. Brown a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner. But Mr. Bennett would observe every detail in the carriage and would write about everything around the character but not about the character or how she feels. This is what makes him the worst culprit because he chooses to ignore the character about whose life he writes a work and indulges in details like where she lives, a view from her window or the people in her lives, perhaps we can hear the voices of all those people in her life but we cannot hear her voice and this is what disappoints.

What can Mr. Bennett be about? I have formed my own opinion of what Mr. Bennett is about—he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to hypnotise us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there. With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner. There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature.

Woolf is aware that her thoughts on these writers may be questioned, for how she can opine that the conventions established by Edwardian novelists were wrong. For this, she answers that though the conventional tools set up by those writers might have worked in their age and literature, it is not the case with modern novelists or literature. She understands when Mr. Bennett says that Georgian writers are unable to make us feel that our characters are real, for she realizes that the conventional ways of Georgian writers may act as impediments in expression for subsequent writers.

She then goes on to say that it is true that the modern writers are suffering because they don’t have a set of rules/manners to follow which would correlate with their age; an age where you witness breaking and falling, crashing and destruction; an age of experiments – Modern age. But these modern writers like Joyce, Eliot and Forster believe that the novels are in the first place about people and only in the second about the houses they live in. In “Modern Fiction”, she questions the customary (Edwardian or according to accepted conventions) way of depicting life in novels and asks whether life is like this.

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impression - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer was a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose and not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external if possible?

This conveyance requires a lot of strength and hence the truth then, when it reaches us is rather chaotic and exhausted. Quoting Ulysses, Queen Victoria and Mr. Prufrock as some names by which Mrs. Brown has become famous, she asks whether or not the reading of Ulysses has made us realize how much of life is excluded or ignored? In the end of this essay, she urges the reader to have a close alliance with writers and tolerate their experiments and failures. She predicts that we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown.

Going a step further in “Modern Fiction”, she says that the proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is a stuff of fiction, every feeling and every emotion, and the spirit of fiction will be renewed if we break her, bully her as well as honor and love her.

Conclusion:

Virginia Woolf has been a proponent of the representation of spirit of characters in novels because she believes that novels (fiction) are essentially about people. In these essays, she has tried to propose what cannot work when there is a transition from one era to another e.g. the conventions of one era may no longer be followed in subsequent era. Though essentially comparing Edwardian and Modern novelists, she has let open a way for further generations to come because the dilemmas and questions faced by writers of each era, at the beginning, remain the same i.e. what and how to represent.

----------------------------
* King Edward died in the year 1910.

[Zaphirenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Τη Virginia Woolf την έχω γνωρίσει μόνο μέσα από τα άρθρα και τα δοκιμια της. Δεν έχω ακόμα ξεπεράσει την ανησυχία μου ότι δε θα τα καταφέρω με τα λογοτεχνικά της έργα και για αυτό προς το παρόν τα έχω αφήσει "για αργότερα", ωστόσο για την αρθρογραφία της έχω την καλύτερη άποψη. Τόσο το "Ένα δικό της δωμάτιο" όσο και αυτή η συλλογή έχει υπέροχα κείμενα για την τέχνη και τη λογοτεχνία, την ανάγνωση και τη θέση της γυναίκας στο πρώτο μισό του 20ού αιώνα. Τα τελευταία είναι και τα αγαπημένα μου, όχι από κάποιον φεμινισμό σε έξαρση, φοβάμαι, αλλά επειδή είναι πιο εύληπτα, πιο προσβάσιμα και πιο απτά. Με τούτα και μ' εκείνα, ίσως καταφέρω να βρω το θάρρος που μου λείπει για να πιάσω την κυρία Νταλογουει. Ίσως και όχι βέβαια, μπορεί να διαβάσω πρώτα κάποια βιογραφία της για να μπω καλύτερα στο κλίμα!

Τελευταίο βιβλίο της χρονιάς, καλά να μας μπει το αναγνωστικό 2020!

[Romie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for my British Lit class and omg I loved it so much! I cannot wait to pick up something by Virginia Woolf, because if I already love this essay, then I can only imagine what it will be with one of her books!

4.5

[Bettie]

Hattip to Masterworks of Early 20th-Century Literature: London 1910 art exhibition

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBenne...

[Kirsty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly wonderful; so thoughtful, and brilliantly constructed.

[Lana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would've been five stars if it hadn't been for the Joyce/Eliot passage. Otherwise, spot on. Goes (surprisingly) hand in hand with Wood's take on the contemporary "smart" novel that seems to know everything there is to know, but fails to show us a single human being.
Woolf's criticism makes so much sense today, 90 years (or so) after she wrote this, when the "knowledgeable" author has a laptop and wifi as his/her main tool whilst crafting characters. Just as Mr. Bennet would've remarked upon the type of cushions surrounding Mrs. Brown instead of the woman herself, today's "knowledgeable" novelist would've pondered her bank account, her blackberry contacts, the underpaid worker who had made her shoes. Everything but the character.
It amazes me how traditional modern fiction is in its pompous attempt to appear relevant and game-changing at the same time. My hat's off to Woolf for seeing through this early on and, not less importantly, for cracking me up with the bootmaker reference. It only saddens me that her tragic end has been romanticized to such an extent that it casts a heavy shadow not only over her fiction, but also those witty, charming and hilarious instances in her masterfully carved essays.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

You may read online here.

Page 3:
" The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else. . . . Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the con- vincingness of the characters. If the characters are real the novel will have a chance ; if they are not, oblivion will be its portion. . . (Mr. Arnold Bennett)

Page 11:
Surely one reason is that the men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face—that there was no English novelist living from whom they could learn their business.

Page 17:
The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him some-thing which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg

I made the proofing of this book for Free Literature and Project Gutenberg will publish it.

From British Library:
‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ is an important exploration of modernism by Virginia Woolf. This edition of the essay was published on 30 October 1924 by the Hogarth Press. It is the first number within the first Hogarth Essays series, which ran from 1924 to 1926.

‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ was originally published as 'Character in Fiction' in the July 1924 issue of The Criterion, a journal edited by T S Eliot.

[Οδυσσέας Μουζίλης · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ποιος είδε τη Γουλφ και δεν την φοβήθηκε! :p

https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2019...

[Houneida Benmahidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essay... made me cry?????

[Stella · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterclass in writing and reading

[Kelsi Gillies · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Virginia Woolf and I love writing UGHHH

[Josefien Linders · Rating 5 out of 5]

a surprisingly easy and entertaining read. An essay with a very convincing, well laid-out argument, supported by sharp analyses and striking comparisons

[Esther Hong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why it's taken me so long but I like Woolf more as an essayist than a novelist. I've always loved anecdotal stuff, readings that make me feel like the writer is chatting with me like a friend (Catcher in the Rye kind of stuff). Context, people, context! The society you inhabit, the society with its values and mores. New tools, people, new tools! Tools that befit the present age, tools that evolve with the times.

Quotes from this essay:
"Mr. Bennett says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?"

"But instead of being gloomy, I am sanguine."

"Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction—we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown."

[Hannah Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf is such a character, who knew she could serve so much shade! This should just be titled, 'The Roast of Arnold Bennett'. This is a great short read if you're new to the realist and modernist movements. So before you pick up 'Mrs Dalloway' or any other Virginia Woolf read, this book is really useful to help you wrap your head around Woolf's style. It's also a great analysis of different approaches to characterisation, even Jane Austen gets a mention (yay!).

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok I really loved this. That's all

[ninfa ☽ · Rating 4 out of 5]

(read for my british literature module) 4 ⭐️ she was onto something here

[val · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so enlightened whenever i read a Woolf essay because you can see her passion and mission as a writer in her essays, and then her intent so clearly reflected in her novels. it just makes me enjoy her work even more when i revisit it, i’m able to read it from a new perspective.

[Dagpauwoogvlinder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love to read about writing something to be read by a writer

[Jonah Gold · Rating 3 out of 5]

i did like it but i kept getting lost because there to many fucking mrs and mr and miss it’s like emma all over again

[giorgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siamo tutti Mrs Brown.
Mrs Brown è noi.
Ma non solo: ogni singolo personaggio, uomo donna bambino; ogni singolo personaggio che abbiamo mai incontrato in letteratura è Mrs Brown. Perché in lei è racchiusa la natura umana, l'essenza della vita, la verità, la purezza, l'anima, la ragione. E noi, in quanto lettori e scrittori, in quanto esseri umani alfabetizzati, abbiamo un unico reale compito - così conclude Virginia - da svolgere: non abbandonare Mrs Brown.
Non bisogna dimenticarsi di lei, lasciarla seduta in un angolo buio di una casa che qualche scrittore Edwardiano sta descrivendo, convinto di star creando intimità col lettore; non dobbiamo lasciarla viaggiare da sola su un autubus che non sappiamo dove sta andando, con quale obbiettivo sta andando, da quanto sta andando. Perché allora, dice Virginia, si potrebbe raccontare una di quelle barzellette - l'inglese, il francese e il russo - ma forse non farebbe nemmeno poi tanto ridere. Perché senza una Mrs Brown di cui parlare, su cui indagare, di cui incuriosirsi, allora cosa leggiamo a fare? Cosa scriviamo a fare, se non abbiamo nessun interesse a raccontare la nostra Mrs Brown?

Non mi aspettavo tutto ciò, più di quanto potessi mai immaginare. E se quel caro Mr Bennet potesse mai davvero capire tutto ciò, se mai potesse rivivere e raccontarci la sua Mrs Brown, quella che ancora manca perché non ancora descritta, sarebbe stato forse diverso?
Non lo so. So solo che da oggi mi prenderò cura della mia Mrs Brown, di quella donna anziana di cui non sappiamo niente, se non il nome inventato e il fatto che un giorno, in autobus, parlava con Mr Smith e non voleva essere sentita. Questo sappiamo di lei, il resto sta a noi raccontarlo. E ogni Mrs Brown è diversa, per il fatto che nessuno è Mrs Brown e tutti lo sono.

[Emmett · Rating 3 out of 5]

por qué ??? me ha emocionado un paper??? de crítica literaria????
okay virginia esta vez cocinaste.
raja de mucha gente y hace muchísimos puntos, habla de forma super accesible y entretenida de la importancia de la creación de buenos personajes en la literatura y al final te habla directamente como lector para decirte que tú también tienes un papel en todo esto (cosa muy olvidada!!!!) y wow honestamente revelador. exquisita última página

[Shriya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why couldn't everyone write like Virginia Woolf? Or better still, why isn't all of literary criticism written like this?

I bet all of us who have struggled with the History of English Literature, would appreciate something written as wittily and as naturally as this.

If you read anything and aspire ever to write something worth its salt, or just are a reader who doesn't know what to expect of a book and fear being overwhelmed by the repute of a great author, read this little essay that will teach you that there are no pedestals for great authors, no predefined tools to write great stories and there should be no humility among readers that " the writer knows best."

The great stories transcend all barriers of language and style and stay with the readers forever. Realism is over-rated and so are authorial conventions.

Ah! If only people like Virginia Woolf lived on even today! We need an unpretentious, true wit in the world of authors again in this century!

[brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ Woolf assess and voices her own regarding the notion of what is considered a ‘real’ character. She writes a overly polemical answer to Arnold Bennetts previous critique and claim that novel was failing as a result of the failure of Georgian novelists. Woolf instead considers that it is the Edwardian novelists - such as Bennett himself - that leave their novels feeling incomplete due to their ambiguity, incongruous, and complex way of writing. Woolf opines that Bennett ignores the character and instead concentrates of their surroundings and other ‘frivolous’ details (house, view from the window, people in their lives) - basically everything but the own characters voice. Woolf brilliantly explains this by saying that Bennett, “is trying to hypnotise us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living inside there.”

[Şima İmşir · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very power- fully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window ; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage ; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature."

[Pollapollina Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amo Virginia Woolf come scrittrice, ma ancora di più la amo come saggista e critica letteraria, con il suo sarcasmo pungente e la forza delle sue osservazioni. In questo bellissimo volumetto, che affronta i diversi modi con cui un romanziere può costruire la propria opera, il testo a fronte mi ha anche permesso una lettura parallela tra italiano e versione originale (con annesso confronto di come io "interpreto" un termine, spesso diversamente dalla traduttrice).

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a better way to kick off this year than with some Woolfian wisdom.
A marvelous essay -and may I say a prophecy?- regarding the transition of English literature and its dominant mode of narration from the omniscient narrator to the stream of consciousness.
I recommend these meagre pages to anyone who wants to witness an overflow in his reveries about the purpose of writing a novel.

[Miss]

Quick and interesting read. It's about what difficulties Georgian writers face because of having to follow Edwardian authors. She uses apt metaphors that can be easily understood and makes her point in a humorous and entertaining way. I don't have much to say about it, because it isn't very long other than I'm glad I read it.

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it for my English Literature course.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this essay; it wasn't at all what I was expecting. The writing was easy to comprehend on the first read, and I liked Woolf's voice throughout this essay. A clever piece of writing, and really inspiring for an amateur writer.