"Whose 1923 essay ""Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"" attacked the literary realism of Arnold Bennett?"
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity. 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. Her response was published in the United States in "Nation and Athenaeum" in December as "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown". The response encouraged her to develop her ideas of cultural relativism further. The following year
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown 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 writer's depiction of "reality". Woolf throws out a challenge to Bennett:"Mr. Bennett says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel