Virginia Woolf – Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown - first edition

Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) Cover design by Vanessa Bell. The Hogarth Essays, First Series, No.1. First impression of 1,000 copies, Printed by Hazel, Watson and Viney, 2s.6d.

This was part of the first series of Hogarth Essays, which were published between 1924 and 1925. It was first written as a response to Arnold Bennett’s criticism of Jacob’s Room which appeared in Cassell’s Weekly in March 1923, and first published in the literary pages of the Nation and Athenaeum which was edited by Leonard Woolf. Later, it was re-worked and extended, then delivered as a lecture to an undergraduate literary society in Cambridge and published as ‘Character in Fiction’ in Eliot’s Criterion.

“In 1924 the Woolfs also started their first series, the Hogarth Essays, by publishing four pamphlets: Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown (October); Roger Fry’s The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (November)’ a thorough and knowledgeable defense of the artist against Freud’s reductive theories; Theodora Bosanquet’s Henry James at Work (November); and T.S. Eliot’s Homage to John Dryden (November).
With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Virginia Woolf’s essay number one and Eliot’s essay number four in the Hogarth series were two of the most significant statements by the early modernists in the refashioning of attitudes towards fiction and poetry. They have become minor classics, their terminology passing into the vocabulary of criticism.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941