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BENNETT, Arnold

British novelist and non-fiction writer (1867-1931)

Bennett worked as a journalist (he once edited Woman's Own), and then spent eight years in Paris, setting himself up as playwright, novelist and essayist. He was a workaholic, writing hundreds of thousands of words each year, and much of his output was pot boiling. But his best novels and stories, set in the English Midlands (the area he called 'the Five Towns', now Stoke-on-Trent), are masterpieces. They deal in a realistic way with the lives and aspirations of ordinary people (factory hands, shop assistants, housewives), but are full of disarming optimism and fantasy. Bennett's characters have ambitions; they travel, they read, they dream. Apart from the Five Towns novels his best known works are two books originally written as magazineserials: The Card (about a bouncy young man whose japes outrage provincial society but who ends up as mayor) and The Grand Babylon Hotel, a set of linked stories about the guests and staff in a luxury hotel.

THE OLD WIVES' TALE  (1908) The lives of two sisters are contrasted: vivacious Sophia and steady Constance. Sophia feels constricted by life in the Five Towns, falls for a handsome wastrel and elopes with him to Paris, where he deserts her. Constance meanwhile marries a clerk in her father's shop, and settles to a life of bored domesticity. The novel charts the sisters' lives, and includes memorable scenes of the 1870 siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. Its concluding section unites the sisters, now elderly, and shows, as their lives draw to a close, that those lives were all they had, that neither achieved anything or made any impact on the world.

The Five Towns novels are Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, These Twain and The Roll Call. Riceyman Steps, set in London, is grimmer and more Zolaesque. Mr Prohack is an entertainment, a good follow-up to The Card. Of Bennett's many other writings, particularly fascinating are his Journals, discussing such matters as his love of France, the meals he ate, the plays and novels he enjoyed, and above all his phenomenal day-to-day productivity, and how much his work earned per week, per month, per year.

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Clayhanger

Riceyman Steps

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (is a set of stories about a US small town whose people's feelings and lives echo those of Bennett's characters) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica

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ZOLA, Émile

French novelist and non-fiction writer (1840-1902)

Zola won scandalous fame at 27 with his novel Thérese Raquin, about a pair of lovers who murder the woman's husband. The book's financial success let him take up fiction full-time, and he began a 20-novel series designed to show -- in a scientific way, he claimed, as species are described -- every aspect of late 19th-century French life. Although each novel is self-contained, their main characters are all members of the two families which give the series its name, The Rougons and the Macquarts. Zola's scheme echoed Balzac's in The Human Comedy, and like Balzac he was interested in exact description, what he called naturalism'. But his morbid and pessimistic nature led him to concentrate on the harsher aspects of human existence, so that his characters often seem less like real human beings than the people dragged into sermons to illustrate the effects of drink, lust or poverty. Outside France, Zola's best-known books are Germinal (1885, about conditions in the coalmines, and including a strike and a major accident), Earth (La Terre, 1887, about subsistence farming), The Belly of Paris (Le ventre de Paris, 1873, about the food-markets of the city), The Boozer (L'assommoir, 1871) and For Women's Delight (Pour le bonheur des dames, 1883, about the staff and customers of a department store).

NANA  (1880) The subject is sex. Nana's mother was a country girl who went to Paris to seek her fortune, became a laundress but was destroyed by drink -- this is the story of The Boozer. Nana grows up as a street-urchin, and later becomes an actress and singer. She is beautiful but corrupt, morally brutalised by her childhood. She sets out systematically to destroy men: Zola thinks of her first as one of the Sirens in myth, drawing men irresistibly to her by the beauty of her voice, and then as a spider, preying on them even as she mates with them. He pities neither Nana nor her victims: like his other novels, this panorama of big-city life is painted entirely in shades of black.

Other books in the series include The Human Beast (La bete humaine) (about the gangs of navvies who built railroads), Money (set among financiers) and The Downfall (Le débacle) (a devastating picture of the 1870 Commune and siege of Paris, which Zola saw as a cleansing operation, ridding the city of the corruption which had led to the misery described in his other books). In his last years he finished the first three books of another series, The Four Gospels: their titles are Fertility, Work and Truth.

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Thérèse Raquin

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest George Gissing, New Grub Street W. Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth Frank Norris, The Pit John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

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