Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf

Abstract

November 4th [1926] We were ten minutes late for dinner at H. G. Wells’s,¹ and H. G. himself was eleven minutes late. The Shaws² were there, and Frank Wells, and Marjorie Craig (H. G.’s morning secretary) and the Leonard Woolfs. Both gloomy, these two last. But I liked both of them in spite of their naughty treatment of me in the press.³ Shaw talked practically the whole time, which is the same thing as saying that he talked a damn sight too much. After dinner he and Dorothy and Virginia Woolf and H. G. formed a group and never moved. I formed another group with Charlotte Shaw and Jane Wells,⁴ and never moved either. I really wanted to have a scrap with Virginia Woolf; but got no chance.

From The Journal of Arnold Bennett 1921–1928, ed. Newman Flower (London: Cassell; New York: Viking, 1933) p. 188 and Letters of Arnold Bennett, vol. III: 1916–1931, ed. James Hepburn (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) pp. 256, 257n.