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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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This book builds on the large volume of existing literature that details the social, moral and economic context in which women of this era operated. It further complements the smaller body of existing writing that probes the interior lives of women. However, where as these latter works use personal documents, such as diaries and letters, to gain insight into the interior lives of mainly upper middle- and upper-class women, this study concentrates on women from the lower and middle levels of the middle classes and on the lower classes. There are many 'gaps' or 'silences' in women's history - especially in relation to their interior lives. Historians seeking to penetrate the thoughts and emotions of 'ordinary' single middle-class women living during the Late Victorian and Edwardian years face a challenging task as these women rarely left personal documents. Popular or bestselling novels are numbered among the few written sources that are available to help historians to fill in some of the absences in the conventional historical record. This study looks at a selection of the popular and bestselling novels of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) and Marie Corelli (1855-1924).Bearing in mind the extensive readership that Bennett and Corelli each enjoyed, we can legitimately assume that these authors' ideas and values, consistently recurring within their fiction, corresponded with many of the emotional concerns and standards of their audience, resonating in the minds of their readers, as well as simultaneously entering into the wider contemporary debate. Using a comparative approach to examine Bennett's solidly popular middlebrow books and Corelli's phenomenally popular or bestselling novels, this work asks the question: which is more valuable to historians of mentalite - middlebrow or bestselling fiction? ... Read more

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"Then you must know a lot about our business," said Miss Maclaren, at the close of the talk. "I wish I'd known this morning. I shouldn't have been so nervous for you. Mr. Cousin or Mr. Orcham might have told me, I think." The head-housekeeper's respect for her subordinate had increased as much as the intimacy. After all there was a glamour about managing a large country mansion for a celebrity that even the Imperial Palace could not offer. Silence fell for a moment. ... Read more

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Inner workings of a hotel; lousy love story
This is one of the most dated of Bennett's novels, even though it is his last one. The love story is soooo 1930s, so arch, and so awkward. But the descriptions of the minutiae of the operation of a large luxury hotel, actually the major part of the book, is fascinating. ... Read more

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He knew everyone, went everywhere, saw everything
Inspired by the journals of the Goncourt Brothers, Arnold Bennett began keeping a journal in the mid-1890s and kept it until the late 1920s. If you're interested in events in England and France during that period,you'll find a treasure trove of observations by one of the great Englishwriters of the time. It would have helped if there had been more footnotesto explain who various people are, or to fill us in on events of the day,but that's a minor quibble. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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A Brilliant and Articulate Study
I found this study of Bennett's writing much more than a useful critical discussion of Modernism and Modernity.While many critical works on literature are hard going, this one is remarkably articulate, written in lively and engaging prose that made me want to go out and read everything Bennett wrote.For anyone interested in Modernism as a literary movement, this study provides a sophisticated analysis of the function of content as well as form in the modernist project.It takes on Woolf's criticism of Bennett's work as "traditional realism" in such a way that reveals him to be a much more complex and interesting writer than she gives him credit for; the short discussion of Bennett's reaction to Woolf's work is particularly telling.This is truly a worthy book. ... Read more