From Edwardian to Georgian Psychical Realism: Bennett, Lawrence, and Beresford

Abstract

It may seem like a strange, almost uncanny act to link the most famous — and in some quarters notorious — Edwardian Arnold Bennett, the even more famous and thoroughly canonical modern novelist D.H. Lawrence, and J.D. Beresford, a Georgian novelist who worked with traditional novel structures and who has slipped into complete obscurity. Archaeological investigation, however, reveals grounds for comparing them. Prominent critic W.L. George (admired by Lawrence) saw Beresford as a successor to Edwardian realists including Bennett (Novelist 65). Furthermore, in 1924, the critic Abel Chevalley argued that, of the younger generation of Georgian novelists, including D.H. Lawrence, Frank Swinnerton, and Hugh Walpole, J.D. Beresford is “the one most equally endowed with that intelligence and that imagination of life which make good writers of fiction.…” (Modem 228). He added that “it is quite possible that [Beresford’s] voice will be heard for a longer time” than the majority of his contemporaries (Modern 229).¹ Most importantly, all three novelists engaged with dynamic psychology in significant though disparate ways, and in all three cases Virginia Woolf contributed to the obscuring of that engagement by misreading these novelists, partially because of her anxiety of influence. This chapter begins by revisiting her pronouncements on her contemporaries before reconstructing Arnold Bennett as an Edwardian psychical novelist and elaborating on the varieties of psychical realism explored by Georgian non-modernists — or at least problematic modernists — Lawrence and Beresford.