ABSTRACT
On one level Arnold Bennett must be thought of as arising out of the same historical moment as Hall Caine and Marie Corelli. He was 14 years Caine's junior but active as an editor, critic and journalist throughout the 1890s. By the time Florence Barclay published her first novel The Rosary in 1909, Marie Corelli's heyday was practically over. It is also part of the well-oiled publicity machine that went into action once The Rosary's winning combination of romance, religion and a stable England became a surprise hit. Bennett's position in the field carries more importance than as a sort of disposable bridge across which 'Victorian creativity' and high modernism might meet to pass the literary baton, a view taken by both Nicholas Feltes and by Virginia Woolf herself. The horrors of the First World War, a direct result of nineteenth-century thinking, had created an urgent need for a break with the destructive past.
