I

Bentley was born in Halifax in 1894, the youngest of John and Eleanor Bentley's four children, and their only daughter.Footnote ⁹ Although eventually head of the family's dyeing and finishing company, her father at this time was a junior partner in a woollen mill and she was thus raised in comfortable, but far from lavish, middle-class surroundings. An outstanding academic career at the council-run Halifax High School for Girls was followed by two separate periods at Cheltenham Ladies College between 1910 and 1914. She left Cheltenham with an external London University BA Ordinary degree and a powerful belief in the ideals of public service that the College so strongly encouraged.Footnote ¹⁰ Following two disastrous attempts at school teaching and a more pleasurable period in London as a Ministry of Munitions clerk, 1918 found Bentley ‘a surplus woman’ and back in Halifax, certain only of her desire to be a novelist. She gained valuable income (and independence) cataloguing local library collections and began the lectures on English literature for which she eventually gained an international reputation. She also started an involvement with the local arts community, joining the Halifax Authors' Circle, a group for aspiring writers, in 1926, and helping found (with, amongst others, Wilfred Pickles) the Halifax Thespians amateur dramatic company the following year.

Above all, she wrote. Publication in 1918 of a set of short stories entitled World's bane and Pedagomania, a satire on teaching, encouraged her to return to a partially written autobiographical novel which eventually appeared in 1922 as Environment. Five more novels followed, mainly dealing with the personal lives of the west Yorkshire middle class. Although favourably received, her work sold only modestly. Bentley's breakthrough came in March 1932 with the publication of Inheritance, an ambitious treatment of the history of the Yorkshire textile industry from the Luddism of 1812 to the economic and political problems of 1931, particularly as witnessed by a fictional manufacturing family, the Oldroyds. Passing through nine editions within the first nine months of publication and serialized in the Daily Dispatch, it was both a notable commercial and, with inevitable exceptions, a critical success. Writing in The Bookman, Winifred Holtby, a friend of Bentley's, but an honest commentator, deemed it one of the ‘three novels of the year’, alongside Aldous Huxley's Brave new world and Charles Morgan's The fountain. It was described by Punch as ‘a masterly family history such as few novelists alive today could have created … a splendid performance difficult to overpraise’, while the Spectator saw it as ‘a book of such strength, honesty, design and scope that praise is an impertinence’.Footnote ¹¹ By 1950, by which time it was in its 28th edition, it been translated into eight languages.Footnote ¹²

Certain key aspects of Inheritance will be scrutinized below, but it is important at this juncture to consider its overall significance within the cultural landscape of the 1930s. Although space has always existed for representations of northern England within the national culture, the extent of that space has invariably been determined by sentiments and fashions shaped elsewhere, particularly in London.Footnote ¹³ The 1930s represents one of the key moments when, by sheer weight of its economic and social dislocation, the north (and the English provinces more widely), gained an unusually prominent position within national discourse. What Peter Davidson has termed this swing of ‘the compass needle … unequivocally northwards’ is visible in a whole range of cultural forms including literature, travel writing, social commentary, film, photography, painting and poetry.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the positing of ‘landmark’ texts is a problematic business, a case can be made for the centrality of Inheritance to this (re-)discovery of the north; Winifred Holtby was surely correct to advise Bentley at a difficult moment in the book's creation to ‘Stick to your own genre … no one else is playing your game.’Footnote ¹⁵ Certainly, Priestley's The good companions (1929), although only partially set in the West Riding, played a significant role and other writers produced northern ‘social’ novels slightly before Inheritance; Lewis Golding's Magnolia Street (1931), an exploration of Jewish–Gentile relationships in Manchester, was especially notable. None, however, gave the region, especially its industrial areas, quite the prominence generated by Bentley's work. The book's appearance at a time when unemployment exceeded two and a half million and debate raged over the ‘Means Test’, introduced in the previous November, was probably propitious here. Although the West Riding was not the area worst affected by unemployment and despite Inheritance dealing with the issue only in its closing section, the novel part coincided with, part captured, a generalized concern about the ‘depressed areas’, thereby giving the book a powerful resonance within contemporary culture. Many others swiftly entered this newly voguish terrain but Bentley deserves acknowledgement for her role in enlarging opportunities, particularly in the literary field, for the depiction of northern/provincial life.

Given the extraordinary success and timeliness of Inheritance, it is unsurprising that Bentley never fully repeated its triumph. Nevertheless, she maintained a prominent and commercially successful role as northern novelist and commentator. Her next work, A modern tragedy (1934), dealing with the impact of the contemporary economic depression upon inter-connected groups of employers and employees, was the Evening Standard ‘Book of the Month’ for February of that year, while critic Robin Temple saw it as ‘not merely the book of the week, but in my view likely to be one of the books of the year’. Winifred Holtby thought it surpassed Inheritance and deemed it ‘the novel of the slump in England’.Footnote ¹⁶Freedom farewell (1936), set in Ancient Rome and intended as an attack on contemporary European dictatorships, had limited impact, with ‘booksellers return[ing] copies when they found the novel lacked a Yorkshire background’.Footnote ¹⁷ A highly successful return to her traditional setting resulted in Sleep in peace (1938), a study of generational shifts within two manufacturing families from 1890 to the 1930s. (This work is also a valuable biographical source, with the central character, the artist Laura Armistead, clearly a barely disguised Bentley.) The English Civil War saga, Take courage (1940), and Manhold (1941), an exploration of West Riding textile dynasties in the eighteenth century, followed before war work with the American Division of the Ministry of Information, testament to her influence in the USA, then intervened to restrict her writing career for the next four years.

While the novel was the cornerstone of Bentley's work, she also produced a substantial body of non-fiction for both national titles such as John O' London's Weekly and for local and regional publications; May 1935 saw the commencement of the literary review column she was to write for the Yorkshire Post until her death, forty-two years later. Bentley saw reviewing as the key aspect of her non-fictional output, providing a certain financial stability – a weekly column for the Manchester Evening Chronicle syndicated to papers in Sheffield and Newcastle earned her 9 guineas a week in 1933 – but also much-needed self-confidence. The Chronicle pieces made, she recorded, ‘the reputation as a critic for myself which I always felt I could achieve’.Footnote ¹⁸ Overall, her journalism gave her a powerful platform within the West Riding in particular, but, certainly in the early 1930s, also in the north more widely. She was given expert status as a public intellectual with the right to speak for, and about, the north of England, and to shape its views on cultural and literary matters. Revealingly, the Chronicle celebrated her arrival in November 1932 by defining her as a critic ‘of peculiar value to Manchester and other North-Country readers. For she is of herself of the North; she still lives in the North; and despite the high national reputation she has built for herself, she is unaffected by the “fashion” and impetuosity which characterize much London criticism.’Footnote ¹⁹ Here was Bentley as both regional literary star and personification of northern common sense in the face of metropolitan faddishness.

Reviewing also pushed her ever closer to the full-scale literary scholarship that matured after 1945, with 1941 seeing the publication of her pamphlet, The English regional novel, written for the writers' organization PEN.Footnote ²⁰ This crisp and informative work remained one of the few worthwhile studies of the topic until the 1980s. Its very commissioning is another demonstration of how closely she had become associated with both this genre and service to the regions more widely. Many readily acknowledged her distinctive contribution to contemporary English culture. As early as 1933, Vera Brittain could describe the businessmen within her own family in Edwardian Buxton as ‘like the shrewd North-country manufacturers in a Phyllis Bentley novel’, thus giving Bentley a pioneer's right of ownership over a certain way of writing about regional life.Footnote ²¹ V. S. Pritchett, although finding her prose style ‘commonplace’ and marred by an ‘over-riding tutorial manner’, saw her as amongst the few ‘who have had the courage or the information to write about industrial life’, while Richard Rheidol saw her as an ‘artist who can supply those defects of imagination and sensitiveness which exist’ in areas, ‘especially in the south of England’, less affected by the slump.Footnote ²² Her role as regional advocate was secure and appreciated.

II

What marketing executives would now term ‘Phyllis Bentley Country’ was a relatively confined and highly personal space, reflecting her family's history and geography from the early nineteenth century.Footnote ²³ It comprised essentially a segment of the West Riding textile district embracing Halifax (Hudley), Huddersfield (Annotsfield), and the smaller textile communities along the Colne (Ire) Valley to the south-west of Huddersfield, especially Marsden (Marthwaite). Within this area, her focus was the smaller-scale, family woollen textile business, with other important aspects of the regional economy, such as Halifax's burgeoning machine tool and confectionery industries, rarely glimpsed.Footnote ²⁴ Her work, then, gave only a partial view, but one acutely informed by personal observation. It was, indeed, the struggle of her family's business to survive in the early 1930s that provided much of the imaginative and emotional energy which fuelled Inheritance.Footnote ²⁵

Her contribution to the regional novel as genre was initially limited. While Carr (1927), a biography of a manufacturer based largely on her father, foreshadowed to some degree the deeper engagement to come, most of her early novels provided local colour rather than the full-blown ‘interpretative regionalism’ which eventually typified her work.Footnote ²⁶ It was Inheritance which began a fictional project designed, for all its local appeal, to present the West Riding to an external audience, especially in London and the south, which Bentley believed had long seen the English north as peripheral and inferior within the national culture.

The gently exaggerated humour, so common in the daily grammar of contemporary north–south discourse, is obvious here, but it must not be allowed to disguise a genuinely held sensibility. Her concern heightened during the early 1930s when she found herself ‘shocked to find how little was known in London about the plight of the industrial north’.Footnote ²⁸ Her mission was to challenge this ignorance.

She did so through an uncompromising commitment to a realist aesthetic, partly the result of the long and deep influence of Bennett and Galsworthy, partly a simple belief, shared by most middlebrow writers, that realism was essential to her didactic purpose. She came to see realism as especially critical to the regional novel.

Significantly, she viewed the northern novel as especially heavily freighted in this regard, commending Greenwood's Love on the dole for ‘that stern realism which has always seemed to me the North's essential contribution to English literature’.Footnote ³⁰ Bentley's own contribution to this ‘stern realism’ was not intended to portray a society ultimately superior to others elsewhere in England. Her work certainly contained more than its share of county and wider northern patriotism and there were aspects of northern life that she did, indeed, see as preferable, especially when London offered the comparison. Nevertheless, she worked within the classic English regionalist tradition of capturing and extolling the particular and distinctive, while celebrating its place within, and its value to, the national whole. She was also willing to criticize certain aspects of provincial life, especially those that had impinged on her own life and opportunities.

Although her main concern was with human relationships, in an age when the industrial and urban north was frequently termed ‘Black England’, she sought to look more thoughtfully at Yorkshire's physical and human geography.Footnote ³¹ As with a number of northern writers, she found a certain beauty in even the harshest of town and cityscapes. A Yorkshire Post article saw the play of lights against the dark hills of Halifax described as a scene of ‘diamonds and black velvet’, an image she utilized several times in fictional settings.Footnote ³² The complexity of the region also greatly engaged her. A modern tragedy begins with a description of a ‘characteristic urban landscape of the West Riding of Yorkshire in the post-war period’. The mills ‘some not working’, the ‘steep streets lined with mean houses’, and ‘the blackened hen coops’ all stand as open acknowledgement of one undeniable aspect of northern landscape, but attention is also directed upwards and outwards to the ‘interlocking hills’ that surround the town.Footnote ³³ This easy merging of the urban and rural, so familiar to citizens of the West Riding but so equally unfamiliar to most outsiders, is a common theme in her novels. However, while the moors above the towns were seen as places for quiet contemplation, there was no attempt to soften them; their wildness was, indeed, seen as a decidedly positive attribute. In Sleep in peace, a visit by Laura Armistead to a ‘softly beautiful’ southern valley encourages a meditation on the comparative rural geographies of north and south.

In this celebration of landscape, Englishness is inflected with a strongly northern tone.

Her explication of West Riding society was driven by a belief in the defining power of environment and history. She posited a distinctive, pan-class ‘Yorkshire’ character marked above all by tenacity and an independence of mind and habit, deriving from a combination of climatic and physical factors – the ‘wild and bleak climate’ and the ‘fierce spirit bred by hills’ – and historical legacy.Footnote ³⁵Inheritance, originally entitled The Oldroyds, took on its new title precisely because it illustrated that the ‘West Riding of Yorkshire was what it was in 1931, with all its rifts and defects and conflicts, its strengths and weaknesses, its vices and virtues, because of the actions of the men and women of 1812’.Footnote ³⁶ Those and subsequent actions were ultimately dominated by the rhythms and disciplines of industry. Treatment of personal relationships and patterns of domestic life certainly formed the core of her writing, but the economic and social context of the textile industry was a constant and defining presence. There was, too, much description of actual processes and business practices; Bentley was never frightened of technical detail. Yorkshire, and the north more generally, was thus given its standard place within both internal and external representations as a site of hard work, the nation's engine room. The region was given further virtue through its being home to ‘ordinary’ people. ‘Ordinariness’ in this context had no particular association with the working class; Bentley's greatest celebration of it, indeed, came in her study of the eponymous middle-class industrialist hero of Carr. Carr had ‘accomplished no great thing’ but, as ‘one of the crowd’, he had sought to maintain ‘what has already been gained by truth and justice, decency and honour, love and kindness, laughter and joy, and to hand them on intact to the next generation’.Footnote ³⁷ Although Bentley did not explicitly equate the ‘ordinary’ with the ‘provincial’, the very fact of her territorial focus tended to conflate the two. In this way, her work added to the sense of the north as solid and reliable, unaffected by fashion and whim.Footnote ³⁸

Above all else, Bentley's Yorkshire was home to the well intentioned. By the early 1920s, she had rejected her family's adherence to the Conservative Party and announced herself a socialist. Hers was, however, an idiosyncratic and hesitant socialism. Although enjoying some association with the Clarion and, later in the 1930s, the Left Review, she consciously eschewed formal political activity, placed a premium on the value of individual action, and continued to believe that a majority on both sides saw the interests of capital and labour were mutual.Footnote ³⁹ Only appeasement, to which she was bitterly opposed, drew her into the public political arena, although her comments made during this brief excursion hardly suggest someone at home there.

Perhaps ultimately, it was a Cheltenham College style sense of public duty rather than socialist conviction that defined her social mission. It is unsurprising, therefore, to see her drift towards a more broad-based liberalism in the late 1930s and eventually to withdraw electoral support for the Labour Party from 1945, because of what she perceived as its dictatorial tendencies: indeed, she voted Conservative in 1951 in the absence of a Liberal candidate.Footnote ⁴¹ For all the ambivalence, in the 1930s and perhaps even beyond, she nevertheless maintained a Utopian faith in the power of albeit ill-defined experiments of ‘fearless brotherhood’ to resolve conflict, through which the most willing of both sides would lead contending classes to mutual understanding.Footnote ⁴²

This worldview underpinned her intense commitment to the idea of the novelist as mediator, an individual privileged ‘by the very truth of their presentation of life, to break down the barriers between the hearts of men’.Footnote ⁴³ Her work thus fully acknowledged the class struggle but her characters usually took up their role within it reluctantly and because of the logic of the situation, rather than through adherence to rigid ideology.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the Luddite sequences that begin Inheritance, the Oldroyds' introduction of mechanized shearing frames is shown as a straightforward business strategy in a period of exceptional economic difficulty. The Luddite croppers, whose hand trade is thus threatened, are, in their turn, depicted not as backward-looking extremists (although some of the leaders are close to caricature), but as men justifiably fighting for their livelihood. Bentley devoted over 8,000 words to their debates and, in a typical device, focused on the mental turmoil of one central character, Joe Bamforth, as he struggled to decide where his sympathies lay.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, a strike over pay cuts in A modern tragedy is shown as something that most on both sides wished to avoid, with the employers trying hard to avoid conflict by maintaining the minimum trade union rate and the workers hoping for a settlement, but eventually convinced of the need for decisive action.Footnote ⁴⁶

Bentley's West Riding had, then, few real villains. Even those few, such as Tasker, the ruthless ‘new’ industrialist lacking deep family roots in the textile trade who dominates A modern tragedy and others who tread close, such as her communists and trade union militants, are generally excused by virtue of some personal circumstance or the depth of their commitment to a cause. (The doctrinal communists, Kay Byram in Sleep in peace and Gamaliel Greenwood in her 1950 novel Quorum, are, for example, both illegitimate). The region does, however, have many unsung heroes, especially among the middle-class manufacturers who were at the heart of so much of her writing. While not always personally pleasant or sympathetic, they are depicted as invariably fair, alert to their obligations to their workforce and often devoted to public service within the wider community; the industrialist patiently devoting hours to public libraries, child welfare clinics, and much else is a recurring and sympathetically drawn figure.Footnote ⁴⁷ Individuals sacrifice their health, their sanity, and sometimes their lives in order to try and maintain their businesses. ‘The General Strike killed my father’ Bentley records of his stroke in 1926 and deaths from overwork, stress, and conflict are frequent within her fiction.Footnote ⁴⁸ The depiction in A modern tragedy of Arnold Lumb's (ultimately unsuccessful) struggle to maintain his family's business, typifies her view of the West Riding textile employing classes as long-suffering, resourceful, dutiful, quietly courageous.

Although the middle class ultimately dominate her books, Bentley was also capable of highly sympathetic portrayal of working-class characters. As already noted, the case for organized labour is always discussed in detail and often with insight. She was also sensitive to the deprivation caused by both ingrained long-term poverty and, particularly, by the onset of unemployment; perhaps threats to her own family's security made her especially sympathetic to the problems of others similarly trapped by economic forces beyond their control. The fictionalized account in A modern tragedy of a hunger march that she had witnessed in Dewsbury – ‘excellent material, just the waste idea which ought to be brought home to everyone’, she recorded in her diary – in which the once cheerful and purposeful Harry Schofield is shown shabby and broken despite all his best efforts, is one of her most effective treatments of working-class hardship.Footnote ⁵⁰

The characters that she most clearly valued were those capable of moving beyond their own class position. One of the best examples is provided by David Oldroyd, the public school educated teenager whose desperate efforts to remain involved in the textile business after the family's bankruptcy in 1931 becomes the major theme at the end of Inheritance. David is an especially significant creation, the descendant of all the major families, both middle and working class, which people the book. Whether because of a desire to show her belief that ‘the barriers of class [were] not so distinct and immovable’ in the West Riding ‘as they are in non-industrial regions’ or because their actions simply represented an effective plot device, Bentley's Oldroyd males have a distinct proclivity for sex, sometimes pre-marital, with attractive women from the lower social classes.Footnote ⁵¹ Resultantly, as David realizes, ‘the blood of all those people who began the conflict in 1812 runs in my veins … Yes everything is all woven up together – which just shows how silly this conflict business is.’ As the train carrying his family from its failed business to a new life in the New Forest approaches the Yorkshire border (a highly significant marker in this journey), he takes action.

This ending, with a young and idealistic character staying to fight for a better life for others, is one regularly adopted in her novels.Footnote ⁵³ Many critics rightly saw Bentley as possessing a sombre, rather dark tone but it was one always infused with hope. Yorkshire tenacity merged in many of her leading characters with a Cheltenham College style belief in duty, to sound a positive, sometimes even inspirational note.

Bentley's fictional world in the 1930s was largely closed in a geographical sense, but other regions, notably London and a rather ill-defined ‘south’, inevitably intruded. The metropolitan world was treated with an ambivalence that, as will be seen, certainly captured Bentley's personal standpoint but also that of many other northerners. Its wares and attractions were often a snare for certain superficial characters. Brigg Oldroyd's compliment to his Yorkshire-born brother-in-law on a London-bought coat is delivered in an ‘ironic and insulting tone’ that implies criticism both of the garment, inferior to its Yorkshire counterparts, and to the wearer for exhibiting unwarranted pretension.Footnote ⁵⁴ In another guise, the south, especially in its rural or coastal form, is synonymous with either self-satisfied exit or ignoble defeat. As one character notes, ‘If there was a type of man he despised, it was the man in the West Riding textile trade who gave up the struggle and retired to a seaside resort on the south coast.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet, London, in particular, could also represent a genuine place of opportunity for those like Inheritance's young Edwardian teacher, Carmine Mellor. Certain that her talent and good looks ‘were not meant to be wasted teaching grimy children in a grimy school in Annotsfield’, her sense ‘of being cramped and caged and thwarted’, dissolves during a few happy months in the capital.Footnote ⁵⁶

It is in this area of personal autonomy and self-esteem that Bentley sounds her most critical notes. Particularly marked was the sense of the West Riding, for all its cultural liveliness – the amateur dramatic society prospers in a number of her novels – as exuding a strong and disabling anti-intellectualism. Discussion of this is most apparent in Sleep in peace, in which Laura's artistic ambitions often clash with more prosaic world views around her. She sees the women of Hudley as vulgar, ostentatious, and shallow; ‘their furniture, their customs, their ornaments, their preferences in plays and books, indescribably tasteless … For topics of conversation they had only clothes and servants; all others, such as politics, economics or art of any kind, were greeted with embarrassed distaste.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The West Riding business mentality is seen as often destructive of artistic aspiration. In her Edwardian adolescence, Laura is made ‘physically sick’ with anger at the sight of manufacturer's son Frederick Hinchliffe, avid poet and literary scholar, denied a university education and placed in a factory office, ‘hot and dirty, with a pencil behind his ear and a ball of string in his hands, performing some stupid, mindless, trivial task’. Although Frederick eventually pursues a literary career in London in the 1920s, he finds himself unable to write the poems on the condition of the industrial West Riding that she requests because, ‘I've been absent too long … lacking these roots, I cannot hope to nourish any poetic growth … my native Riding has gone from me.’ Laura mourns a voice lost to Yorkshire through its careless dismissal of artistic talent.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is little wonder that some characters sought escape through real or imagined journeys south and away from what Rosamond Haigh in A modern tragedy termed ‘that place of smoke and duty’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Many characters also show significant degrees of insecurity about their provincial status, with language and pronunciation a particular problem. Carmine, faced with a new life in Camden Town found herself initially ‘nervous and uncomfortable … [she] could hear herself using Yorkshire words and tones, and the harder she tried to speak good English … the more provincial, in her self-consciousness, she became’. Similarly, on visiting a friend at university in London, a teenage Laura Armistead is rendered almost mute by the self-confidence of the undergraduates she encounters at dinner and then, on finding her voice, discovers that ‘under the strain her accent grew more and more north-country’.Footnote ⁶⁰ While Bentley produced a thoughtfully sympathetic view of a region often seen as ‘other’ within the national culture, she also showed how easily that sense of ‘otherness’ could be internalized.

III

The sounding of these more problematic notes are all the more significant because they provide crucial clues to Bentley's personal relationship with the West Riding. There can be no denying her deep, often profound affection for Yorkshire, with her home town often the beneficiary of its practical manifestations. Bentley became president of the Halifax Authors' Circle in 1931 and its attendance books attest to her deep commitment even at the height of her popularity in the 1930s, noting her presence at sixty-four of the Society's ninety-four meetings between 1931 and 1939.Footnote ⁶¹ Her work for the Halifax Thespians was similarly impressive. Beyond this and many other personal interventions, Bentley also firmly believed that novelists should remain in their native regions, arguing that severance from them seriously weakened the creative process, not least by preventing them from witnessing the development of individual character in a local context over a long period.Footnote ⁶²

However, Bentley's love of place was only matched infrequently by her love of being in it. The West Riding came perilously close to being too claustrophobic, too ‘provincial’, for its greatest chronicler and ultimately, probably only her family obligations held her there. Moreover, her attitude to it was further complicated by periods of acute awareness that the characteristics that could make her Yorkshire life seem unexciting and narrow might be precisely those that some metropolitans attributed to her; like Laura lost for words at a London dinner table, she felt herself to be a ‘provincial’ lacking polish, sophistication, and wider vision. Her 1962 autobiography, ‘O dreams, O destinations’, is in many ways a candid and sometimes self-coruscating work but it was constructed so as to disguise the full extent of many of these problems. It certainly acknowledged much early disdain for the West Riding. On her return from Cheltenham in 1914 she had found that Halifax ‘thought me odd and stuck-up, while I was apt to regard Halifax as ignorant and Philistine’.Footnote ⁶³ However, the narrative from that point stresses her increasing sympathy for her native area as economic crisis deepened from the late 1920s.

By 1931, the autobiography claims, she ‘felt now wholly committed to my family and to the West Riding’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similar versions of this journey from aloof critic to loving champion appeared in a number of her other autobiographical writings.Footnote ⁶⁶ Interestingly, her fiction is also constructed, whether wittingly or otherwise, to imply a dogged authorial loyalty to Yorkshire. David Oldroyd is only one of a number of her leading protagonists who regard ‘break[ing] off in the middle of the fight’ as unacceptable. Rosamund Haigh in A modern tragedy fights off a momentary urge to flee with the corrupt businessman with whom she has fallen in love and returns with him to Yorkshire and his inevitable imprisonment. Laura Armistead goes as far as leaving Hudley but combines a London flat with a cottage in Howarth, metropolitan sophistication suitably balanced by Yorkshire roots.Footnote ⁶⁷

Bentley's diaries and correspondence, significantly, embargoed for public use until 2002, can often tell rather more complex tales of a struggle far more tortured than that suggested by the public testament. It is initially surprising to find a woman remembered at her funeral ‘as a kind of one-woman Yorkshire institution’, and as someone whose ‘whole life centred upon her love of Yorkshire’, recording in her diary in 1935 that she felt ‘hysterically thwarted, furious, even murderous! Life so unspeakably dreary here – nothing but work and taking mother out and listening to her complaints.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Collectively, these sources certainly show a writer so intensely frustrated that, far from becoming ‘wholly committed’ to Halifax by 1931, she was in fact considering ever more seriously, and in total contradistinction to the advice she would give to others, a move to London. The capital has long been the essential location for ambitious figures in the cultural world and its centripetal pull was as attractive to Bentley as to most others.Footnote ⁶⁹ Attendance at a party at J. B. Priestley's Hampstead home in 1929, a ‘dream of bliss’ at which, more prosaically, she met her future agent, A. D. Peters, was followed by other visits to London, including the several weeks spent with Vera Brittain in 1932.Footnote ⁷⁰ For all the problems that ensued, Brittain was generous with her time and social contacts, and as the return to Yorkshire loomed, Bentley was moved to record in her diary that she had ‘only a fortnight left of freedom’.Footnote ⁷¹

Her southward longings were certainly encouraged by her London literary friends and in 1936, Bentley had finally decided to move.Footnote ⁷² Early in the year she had told herself that ‘I must accept this gloomy Yorkshire life and make something of it’ but, within a few months of writing this less than ringing endorsement of her provincial existence, she was again longing ‘to be away, in a tiny flat in London’.Footnote ⁷³ She went as far as announcing her imminent departure to the Leeds-based novelist, Lettice Cooper, who was distraught at the loss of a close relationship that had sustained her own often problematic provincial career. In fact, Bentley's sense of duty to her mother led to her abandon her own plans and it was Cooper who eventually left for a post on Time and Tide in 1939, leaving her friend to ‘miss her greatly’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Ironically, when Bentley's Ministry of Information work finally allowed her to move to London for four years, the exigencies of wartime inevitably reduced the quality of the cultural experience she might have expected in peacetime.

A considerable part of Bentley's often troubled attitude toward her Yorkshire life stemmed from purely personal circumstances. Shyness and a firm conviction in early adulthood that she was physically unattractive, coupled with heavy domestic obligations and the belief that marriage would distract her from her literary career, resulted in her remaining single throughout her life. However, the early 1930s saw the flowering of a strong, although platonic, friendship with Harold Latham, vice-president of her American publishers Macmillan, followed by two sexual relationships, the first with the playwright and literary critic St John Ervine, and the second with George Platt Brett, the Macmillan president, which lasted from 1939 to 1961.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is no coincidence that some of her most difficult periods map almost exactly on to the state of her relationships with these two (married) men. Ervine, in particular, unsettled her greatly, leaving her uncertain as to whether he ‘has liberated me or disintegrated me’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even more problematic was the deeply troubled relationship between Bentley and her mother, whose expectations always seemed to exceed her daughter's achievements. ‘Only very late in life did I begin to understand that she was to be pitied, not hated for this incessant tragic frustration: in earlier days I suffered from it too much to preserve calm judgment.’Footnote ⁷⁷ After her father's death in 1926, the problem was compounded by the domestic responsibilities that now passed to her as her mother's companion and helpmate. For all the painful fidelity of Bentley's autobiographical writing on this topic, her diaries once again show an even greater intensity of feeling. Perhaps the bitterest comment was recorded as she prepared for the future after her mother's death. ‘Poor Mother! Poor little thing! I must not grow to like her.’Footnote ⁷⁸

Bentley's difficulties in balancing domestic obligations with a professional writing career were, admittedly, effectively the norm for women writers. It has been shrewdly argued that Vera Brittain's initial friendship with Bentley was partly based on the latter's acute understanding of the disruption caused by the needs of others, in this case a young family. Dorothy Whipple was another close friend and novelist who felt keenly the burdens of family life. ‘Men are very fond of saying that women haven't done anything in the arts, but what chance have we? My time is taken up by the small demands of other people.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Nevertheless, while Bentley's problems were hardly unique, their severity and longevity undoubtedly rendered them a genuinely significant burden. They also had to be faced in a town undoubtedly cut off from the main currents of literary life. While Halifax, a town of some 100,000 people, offered much vigorous amateur cultural activity, it was a difficult environment for an aspiring writer. A weekend visit to a bookseller's banquet at Harrogate in 1931 upset her because she knew nobody there, even from the regional cultural community, and ‘nobody took the slightest notice of me’ apart from ‘the Vicar of Leeds, whom I shall always gratefully remember’.Footnote ⁸⁰ There are elements of self-pity and over-reaction here – few provincial writers had her London literary connections – but this feeling of isolation from the world she sought clearly led to a sense of intellectual and emotional isolation from the one which she generally inhabited. Her reference to her ‘gloomy’ Yorkshire life has already been noted. In similar vein, she recorded in her diary in 1935 how she longed ‘so passionately for a fuller life, with people who speak my language’.Footnote ⁸¹ Even those who supposedly did so were sometimes found wanting: ‘I don't enjoy the Authors’ Circle a bit nowadays; whether they are horrid or I am I don't know.'Footnote ⁸² Serving the region appears here effectively an act of duty, even penance, rather than pleasure.

This binary opposition of provincial entrapment versus metropolitan opportunity running through Bentley's testimony appears, at first sight, almost a cliché, but to her it was a genuine and deeply problematic reality. So, too, was her deep sense of provincial inferiority. Her friendships with Brittain and, surprisingly, perhaps even Winifred Holtby, were critical in this sense and are worthy of exploration not only because of the light they shed on Bentley's personal situation but because of their significance to the nature of regional and metropolitan cultural politics more widely. Bentley and Holtby had first met in 1929 and their growing and genuine friendship inevitably led to Bentley being introduced to Brittain. Although their relationship had obviously been fairly minimal in that they were initially uncertain that they would recognize each other, Brittain invited Bentley to Chelsea for two separate visits in the early summer of 1932 at the very moment when Inheritance was becoming a literary cause célèbre.Footnote ⁸³ The subsequent reputations of the two women make it easy to forget that in 1932, in terms of their fictional output at least, Bentley was very much the senior partner. As Deborah Gorham has argued, ‘unquestionably, Brittain initiated the friendship because of Bentley's success’, her motives mixing ‘envy and genuine admiration, and … an eye to what a friendship with this rising star might do to her reputation’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Bentley was, in fact, to be instrumental in helping to place Brittain's autobiographical Testament of youth with both Gollancz and Macmillan. The friendship blossomed rapidly but, within a year, had unravelled so totally that the two agreed not to communicate in any form for the foreseeable future. Although Holtby's death in 1935 led to a partial reconciliation, Bentley took a long time to recover from her experience.Footnote ⁸⁵

The causes of tension were numerous. There were specific moments of conflict, publicly when Bentley wrote a lukewarm dust jacket endorsement for Testament of youth – Holtby wrote the replacement – and privately when, on a disastrous visit to Halifax, Brittain made what Bentley described as ‘well, if not a homosexual proposal, something very near to it’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Whatever the erotic undercurrents of the friendship, it was certainly too fierce, having as it did, the ‘intensity and obsessiveness of an adolescent crush’ for both parties.Footnote ⁸⁷ Brittain, for example, wrote forty-five letters to Bentley in just six months in the second half of 1932. Bentley found Brittain over-bearing and, like many others, was angered by what she perceived as the excessive demands made on an increasingly ailing Holtby. Gorham has also argued that ‘the friendship between Brittain and Bentley soured so quickly because the women had incomplete perceptions of each other's personalities’.Footnote ⁸⁸ While this undoubtedly added to their catalogue of problems – and what follows draws on Gorham's thoughtful analysis – a significant element of this misreading of ‘personality’ actually derived from a highly charged view of what it meant to be ‘metropolitan’ and ‘provincial’.

As Bentley records in her autobiography, her Chelsea-based friends, and Brittain especially, represented the height of metropolitan chic that formed a painful counterpoint to her ‘gawky, self-righteous little provincial’.Footnote ⁸⁹ An extensive detailing of the ‘thoroughly provincial’ character she then was, ‘simple, naive, credulous, apt to accept anything said to me at face value … [dressed] all wrong for London’, is juxtaposed with a celebration of her friends' social and cultural attributes.Footnote ⁹⁰ While the description of Holtby also includes a generous character assessment, it comprises, to a considerable degree, merely a list of desirable social and cultural attributes. ‘Tall and fair and handsome, with those wonderful blue eyes, that charm and gaiety and warmth, that lovely speaking voice, that precision of English, that flat in London, that post on Time and Tide, that Oxford degree! I loved her dearly – who did not love Winifred?’ Brittain becomes almost solely an inventory of sophistication. ‘Vera was beautiful; she had a husband, two children and an Oxford degree; she was admirably dressed, spoke and wrote fluent, pointed Oxford English and knew hosts of interesting people in Literary London.’Footnote ⁹¹

Bentley's glamorization of her friends is perhaps rather too neatly done, a device for setting the scene for the clash of cultures that ensued. Nevertheless, it both captures the essence of the clash between ‘provincial’ and ‘metropolitan’ as she experienced it and the complexity that lies behind the two terms, made all the more powerful because of the intricate array of notions about status, class, and education which they so easily attract and convey. They are both ultimately short-hand for capturing complex positions within a set of power relationships. As the work of Anthea Trodd and Catharine Clay has shown, the ‘metropolitan’ literary world was multi-faceted, with (crudely) the older literary elite of Hampstead, highbrow Bloomsbury and middlebrow Chelsea all involved in battles over literary status and function.Footnote ⁹² Bentley and her London friends knew this but happily used the metropolitan label to define a certain level of cultural authority. ‘Provincial’ very much shares with its opposite this characteristic of helpful imprecision. Although feeling ‘provincial’ does here involve, for Bentley, an essentially objective sense of territorial distance from the capital and a set of differences that followed from that, it also becomes conflated with insecurities that are in no way place-specific. The envy of those who graduated from Oxford University with honours, rather than Cheltenham Ladies College with an ordinary degree, and who spoke with the (placeless) ‘Oxford English’ and not educated ‘provincial’, is particularly marked. The insecurity over language shown by her fictional characters undoubtedly reflected her own, a set of self-improving resolutions including the imprecation to ‘speak good English, not using Yorkshire inflections, and shunning slang’.Footnote ⁹³

Significantly, the view of Bentley from Chelsea was also structured by a sense of province and metropolis that owed only some of its meaning to place. In terms of objective geography, neither Brittain, raised in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Macclesfield, and Buxton, nor Holtby, the daughter of a wealthy East Riding farmer, were in any sense metropolitan. What had made them so were precisely those Oxford educations and their post-university location and lifestyle. Interestingly, Holtby, always too self-consciously ‘Yorkshire’ ever to see herself as a true metropolitan, nevertheless seems to have viewed Brittain as one, to the extent of actually terming her a ‘southerner’. In a letter to Bentley that attempted to rebuild the relationship between her two friends, she tried to cast their clash as matter of northern versus southern temperament. ‘I know that for those of us of the north, friendship with these temperamental and quick-tongued southerners is hard – but I know it is infinitely worthwhile.’Footnote ⁹⁴ While there may be some artifice at work here, with geography gaily ignored in the interests of mediation, Holtby's intriguing (mis)placing of Brittain is more likely to be an unconscious yet revealing example of how certain forms of cultural capital, skilfully deployed, could bolster subtle but important hierarchies of status and personal geography.

Within this dramatic web of territorial anxieties, the two main protagonists played their allotted parts only too well. Bentley, acutely aware both of her tendency to ‘those Yorkshire characteristics which I often disliked in my fellow-Yorkshiremen; I was both blunt and reserved’, found herself feeling ‘thoroughly inferior to Vera’ in all matters beyond novel-writing.Footnote ⁹⁵ Too easily, therefore, she saw not the serious writer that Brittain undoubtedly was, but, in Gorham's words, only the ‘beautiful social butterfly’ of the London literary circuit.Footnote ⁹⁶ Again, for all her enjoyment of London, Bentley tended to see its culture as superficial and overwrought. It is noteworthy that when she wrote to Blackburn-born Dorothy Whipple about Brittain's possible lesbian overtures she asked for, in Whipple's paraphrase, ‘a few calm Lancs words on the subject’.Footnote ⁹⁷ (On a later occasion she described Whipple to a friend as ‘sincere, northern’, thus turning birthplace into moral category.)Footnote ⁹⁸ For her part, Brittain, according to her husband, George Catlin, treated Bentley too much as a ‘country cousin’ and (as did Holtby), probably overplayed the extent of her personal and sexual frustrations. How could they, Brittain wondered, ease ‘her dark, intense misery and the tragedy of grief and frustration … soften her, make her happier and more attractive’.Footnote ⁹⁹ (Ironically, Bentley's future lover, George Brett, was the unconsummated grand passion of Brittain's life.Footnote ¹⁰⁰) Like Bentley, Brittain believed in an authentic northern/Yorkshire ‘character’ but reacted against it. She recorded how, after her first argument with Bentley, ‘I felt awkward because I don't really understand Yorkshire people (except Winifred now) nor how far one can go in intimacy with them.’ A further falling out led her to claim that ‘I don't understand the unrelenting hardness of the Yorkshire temperament when angry.’Footnote ¹⁰¹

Above all, Brittain's detestation of provincial life was only too obvious. Testament of youth contains a scathing attack on her experiences in Edwardian Buxton.

As a result, Brittain was happy to admit that

This was further sharpened by an occasional, and probably well-disguised, sense of inferiority that reminded her rather painfully of her roots. Winifred Holtby was probably the only person to whom Brittain could admit that H. G. Wells made her feel ‘genteel’ and ‘provincial’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Brittain was clearly directing her venom at the smaller provincial towns – she was quite happy to admit that Manchester had ‘a rich and enterprising life’ – and in no way saw her new Yorkshire friend as suffused with the worst of Buxton values. Moreover, she was fully aware that, with the successful publication of Inheritance, Bentley was to be respected (she did admit to jealousy of her success) and was perfectly willing to take some advice.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless, she could not jettison her assumption that her lifestyle and location made her, intrinsically, the senior partner. A supposedly conciliatory letter written to Bentley after her Halifax visit in December 1932 is highly revealing. ‘I'd looked forward so much to staying with you. Perhaps it seems hard to believe that for a person whose life is so full and exciting as mine, a quiet week in a provincial town with a family I didn't know should have seemed so entertaining a prospect – but it represented such a change, and such peace, and above all the opportunity of getting to know you better.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Parts of Brittain's damning indictment were, of course, remarkably similar to sentiments expressed by Bentley in her more pessimistic moments. However, they took on a very different meaning, and, for Bentley, a painful one, when uttered by a London-based critic rather than a locally rooted critical friend to the provinces. In a few ill-considered words, Brittain's view of the geographical and thus the power relationship between the two friends was blatantly exposed.

From the 1940s, Bentley's acute sense of ‘provincialism’ partly receded as she gained confidence from encounters with the wider literary and cultural world – America, which ‘unkinked many of my complexes’, was eventually crucial here, at least in terms of giving her greater self-confidence – and partly metamorphosed to become a source of strength as she sought to protect regional writing and writers from ‘the snobbery of Metropolitanism’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the 1930s, however, the situation was clearly far less comfortable. At a professional level, Bentley may well have actually benefited from her provincial location, and the exact timing of her emergence from within it. Her distinctive regional voice earned her a standing within the national culture that might easily have been denied had she written about a different place or even the same one at a different time. Again, her period of exposure to national attention gave her a platform and a degree of cultural authority within the West Riding and the north more widely that was likely to have been far greater than that available to her in a highly competitive metropolitan setting. Even the tensions she felt between loyalty to region and the desire to escape it both metaphorically and literally were valuable, serving as a creative force that shaped and coloured so much of her work. By the later stages of her career, she seems to have accepted (or, perhaps, persuaded herself) that staying had been to her creative advantage. Reflecting in her diary on a 1962 television appearance in which the interviewer ‘tried to make me say I lived in a stuffy bourgeois atmosphere and would have written better if I had left Yorkshire’, she records the answer that she should have given as ‘I would have been a happier person but a worse writer’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, while Bentley settled for literary rather than personal satisfaction, the personal costs exacted are made utterly explicit. As she discovered, serving the region from within was sometimes a thankless task.