Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Abstract

The writer Arnold Bennett had written a review of Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) in Cassell's Weekly in March 1923, which provoked Woolf to rebut it. She recorded in her diary in June that Bennett accused her of writing about characters that couldn't survive.Woolf addresses what she sees as the arrival of modernism, with the much cited phrase "that in or about December, 1910, human character changed", referring to Roger Fry's exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. She argued that this in turn led to a change in human relations, and thence to change in "religion, conduct, politics, and literature". She envisaged modernism as inherently unstable, a society and culture in flux. She develops her argument through the examination of two generations of writers. Mr. Bennett was a critic of not just Woolf, but modern writers in general. In particular, Bennett challenged modern writers' depiction of "reality". - Summary by Wikipedia