Edward Garnett and Arnold Bennett: The Publisher’s Reader and a Budding Novelist

Four hitherto unpublished letters from Edward Garnett (1868–1936) to Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), dated 26 February and 6 March 1902, and 27 November and 29 December 1908, throw light on Garnett’s perspicuity as a publisher’s reader for Duckworth and on the earliest reactions to Anna of the Five Towns, the novel that put Bennett on the map as a writer of fiction. Garnett had caveats: the suicide of Willie Price should be cut and in places, the novel was “over prosaic”. However, it gave Garnett and his wife, Constance Garnett (1861–1946), translator of Turgenev—an author that also interested Bennett—“enormous pleasure” and was strongly recommended. Bennett resisted making the changes and Anna was published by Chatto & Windus, who offered a higher royalty. It had a laudatory reception. The letters—the first pages of which are included in the article as an illustration of each transcription—illuminate Garnett and Bennett, their attitudes, and other literature they encountered. In 1902 Bennett was the supplicant, hoping to persuade Duckworth to publish his work, but by 1908 the correspondence is between equals. Thereafter it was Bennett who was the established figure in the literary world.