Modern readers are most likely to know Arnold Bennett as a novelist and journalist, but to his contemporaries he was also familiar as a dramatist. He began experimenting with the play form during his years as a contributor to and then, later, editor of the magazine Woman, a periodical with which he was associated from 1894 to 1900. In Woman he published several duologues, which created enough interest among his readers to encourage him to try writing one-act plays. But it was not until 1908 with Cupid And Common Sense that Bennett finally had one of his plays produced.

Between 1894 and 1908 he served a long, arduous apprenticeship, working alone and in collaboration with such writers as Arthur Hooley, Eden Phillpotts, and H. G. Wells on curtain raisers, adaptations of novels (Phillpotts's Children of The Mist and Violet Tweedale's Her Grace's Secret ), and full-length plays such as "The Crime," on which he...