Author
Arnold Bennett
1 award win, 0 nominations across 1 book.
Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English novelist, playwright, and journalist, whose novels and plays generally reflected middle-class life in north Staffordshire. He was born in Hanley, Staffordshire (which is now Stoke-on-Trent), the son of a solicitor. He was educated in Newcastle-under-Lyme. After school, he worked for his father, and in his spare time he was a journalist. At age twenty-one, he moved to London to work as a solicitor's clerk.
Riceyman Steps
Published 1923
Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after.
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