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The Columbia History of the British NovelRealism persisted in the works of both Bennett and Wells only in that each felt obliged to respond to it. But they wielded the conventions of realism to opposite effects. H. G. Wells reworked the form he had inherited in the hope of achieving a greater realism, of extending the range of unrealities he might expose. Arnold Bennett, on the other hand, used realist conventions in order to subvert them. The coupling of Wells and Bennett as realists had less to do with the novels they wrote than with the image of the novelist they promulgated. The partly self-created public images of Wells and Bennett are worth examining in some detail. That the two most prominent serious novelists of the Edwardian period should be spoken of as one is not sur-659- prising; the names Wells and Bennett were frequently linked by the authors themselves. Wells sketches the dual portrait in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934): We were both about of an age; to be exact he was six months younger than I; we were both hard workers, both pushing up by way of writing from lower middle-class surroundings, where we had little prospect of anything but a restricted salaried life, and we found we were pushing with quite surprising ease; we were learning much the same business, tackling much the same obstacles, encountering similar prejudices and antagonisms and facing similar social occasions ...» |
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