Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is an essay about generational conflict and how the writing and reading of literary fiction change in response to social transformations. Woolf’s argument concerns the depiction of “character” in fiction. Character was the element of novel writing that Bennett identified as deficient in younger novelists. Bennett’s essay used Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) as an example of a wider trend of novelists emphasizing “originality” and “cleverness” over the development of “real” characters. Woolf starts by agreeing with Bennett that character is fundamental to fiction. She writes that character creates the impetus and “seduct[ion]” to write fiction at all (3). Where she differs from Bennett is in the definitions of “character” and “reality.” Her argument reflects the Modernist position that traditions should be handled critically and with conscious care, and that inherited conventions should not be unthinkingly duplicated. It also demonstrates a Modernist—or “Georgian”—skepticism of the assumption that “reality” can be captured objectively (expressed by Bennett and characteristic of realist literature of the Edwardian era).

Woolf argues that society changed in the transition from the Edwardian to the