SOURCE: A review of Orlando, in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 232-34.

An English novelist, short story writer, and essayist of the early twentieth century, Bennett is credited with bringing techniques of European Naturalism to the English novel. He is best known as the author of The Old Wives' Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy (1910-16), realistic novels depicting life in an English manufacturing town. In the following excerpt, which originally appeared in the Evening Standard in November 1928, Bennett unfavorably reviews Orlando.

You cannot keep your end up at a London dinner-party in these weeks unless you have read Mrs Virginia Woolf's Orlando. For about a fortnight I succeeded in not reading it—partly from obstinacy and partly from a natural desire for altercation at table about what ought and ought not to be read. Then I saw...