Abstract
When one considers the regional novel it is usual to take into account how novelists have used local material in their work. This is the approach taken by Phyllis Bentley in her booklet The English Regional Novel where she looks particularly at manifestations of regionalism in the elements of character, plot, setting, narrative and theme in the works of four major writers: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Arnold Bennett. She defines a regional novel as ‘a novel which concentrating on a particular part, a particular region of a nation depicts the life of that region in such a way that the reader is conscious of the characteristics which are unique to that region and differentiate it from others in the common motherland’. 1One cannot fault this definition; and there is much to be said for the manner in which Bentley investigates the regional influence in well-defined areas of her chosen novels. But, as I intend to show, this seems to me a limited approach because its emphasis is on the effect of the region on the literature and does not see it as intrinsic to the writing.
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Notes
Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941) p. 1.
Lucien Leclaire: A General Analytical Bibliography of the Regional Novelists of the British Isles, 1800–1950 (Clermont-Ferrand: Imprimerie G. de Bussac, 1954) and Le Roman régionaliste dans les Iles Britanniques, 1800–1950 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1954).
Leclaire, Le Roman regionaliste, p. 122.
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) vi, p. 424. The Midland counties are Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Notting-hamshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire.
Henry Auster, Local Habitations: Regionalism in the Early Novels of George Eliot (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) p. 20. Auster quotes F. W. Morgan’s article ‘Three Aspects of Regional Consciousness’ in The Sociological Review, xxi (1939) p. 84: ‘absorption in a particular locality; absorption, not merely interest’.
bavid Masson, British Novelists and their Styles (Cambridge, 1859) p. 220.
David Lodge, ‘Arnold Bennett: The Old Wives ‘Tale ’in The Modes of ModernWriting: Metaphor, Metonymyand the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) pp. 27–35.
Basil Willey, ‘Mark Rutherford’ in More Nineteenth-Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (New York: Harper and Row, 1966) D. 189.
‘E.T.’(Jessie Chambers), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, 2nd edn, ed. J. D. Chambers (London: Cass. 1965) op. 103. 105.
Mark Rutherford, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford ’s Deliverance, ed. Basil Willey (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969) p. 125. Hereafter referred to as Rutherford. Autobiocravhu.
Margaret Drabble, Arnold Bennett (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) p. 97.
15 October 1896; The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (London: Cassell, 1932) i, p. 18.
The New Statesmap. 13 October 1923, pp. vii-x.
Journals of Arnold Bennett, II, p. 83.
Letter to Arthur McLeod, 2 December 1912, Letters, I, p. 482.
Letter to Arthur McLeod. 28 November 1912. ibid., p. 481.
Ibid., p. 459.
Journals ofArnoldBennett, II, p. 280.
29 September 1896; lournals ofArnold Bennett. I. p. 16.
George Eliot, ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story’, Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. David Lodge (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1973) p. 133.
Dorothy V. White, The Groombridge Diary (London: Oxford University Press, 1924) p. 66p.
Nicoll made the identification in British Weekly, 9 July 1896, p. 185. White challenged it in a letter (signed ‘Reuben Shapcott’) in British Weekly, 30 July 1896, p. 232.
Louis Tillier, Studies in the Sources of Arnold Bennett ’s Novels (Paris: Université de Paris, th6se complementaire, 1952) p. 30.
Marghanita Laski, George Eliot and her World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973) P. 79.
George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical, ed. Peter Coveney (Harmonds-worth, Middx: Penguin, 1972) pp. 79–80. (First published 1866.)
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Nottinghamand the Mining Countryside’, Phoenix, p. 135.
Rutherford. AutobioQravhu• v. 2.
Arnold Bennett, The OldWives ‘Tale, ed. John Wain (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguip. 19831 p. 204. (First vublished 1908.1
Mark Rutherford, Miriam ’s Schooling, 4th edn (London: T. Fisher Unwin, p.d.; first published 1890) pp. 135ff.; Catharine Furze, 4th edn (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894; first published 1893) p. 181. See also Basil Willey, More Nineteenth-Century Studies. pp. 217ff.
D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 76.
Rutherford, AutobIography, p. 34.
‘Lawrence knows and renders ... what have been the conditions of his own individual development; to be brought up in the environment of a living tradition — he is recording, in his rendering of provincial England, what in the concrete this has meant in an actual civilizatiop. As a recorder of essential English history he is a great successor to George Eliot ‘[F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (Harmondsworth, Middx, Penguin 1961 and 1967).
George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, Essays of George Eliot, ed. T. Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) p. 278.
Arnold Bennett, How to Become an Author (London: C. A. Pearson, 1903) p. 135.
Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 9.
Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the 1840s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) pp. 88–91. Valentine Cunningham claims that ‘some form of Dissent is frequently part of the “genius of place” that Kathleen Tillotson has discussed ’(Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 74).
Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 70.
Basil Willey, ‘Introduction’ to Rutherford, Autobiography, p. 10.
Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1967) p. 235. (First published 1902.)
Basil Willey uses the phrase ‘religionless Christianity ‘in the ‘Introduction’ to Rutherford, Autobiography, p. 17; Wilfred Stone, Religion and Art of William Hale White (Mark Rutherford) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954) p. 67.
George Eliot, letter to François d’Albert-Durade, 6 December 1859; The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven and Yale: Yale University Press, 1954–78) iii, p. 231.
Arnold Bennett, ‘My Religious Experience’, Sketches fbr Autobiography, ed. James Hepburn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979) pp. 168–9, 176.
‘At the present moment I do not, cannot believe in the divinity of ie., USA’ ‘letter to Revd Robert Reid. 2 December 1907, Litters, I. p. 40.
D H. Lawrence. n ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’ Phoenix, II 600
,45. Ibid., v. 601.
‘I would show that the mind of man is not an exception to Nature’s other works; that like everything else it has received a determinate character; that all our knowledge of it is precisely of the same kind as that of material things, and consists in the observation of its order of action, of the relation of cause and effect ‘[Charles Bray, The Philosophy of Necessity; or the Law of Consequences as Applicable to Mental, Moral and Social Science (London: Longman, 1841) p. 81.
Bennett, The Old Wives Tale, pp. 250–1.
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© 1989 Bridget Pugh
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Pugh, B. (1989). The Midlands Imagination: Arnold Bennett, George Eliot, William Hale White and D. H. Lawrence. In: Preston, P., Hoare, P. (eds) D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09848-4_9
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