Sophie Dahl (born 15 September 1977), born Sophie Holloway, is an English author and former fashion model. She was born in London, the daughter of actor Julian Holloway and writer Tessa Dahl. Her maternal grandparents were author Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal. Her paternal grandparents were actor Stanley Holloway and actress and chorus dancer Violet Lane. She was the inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her maternal grandfather's book The BFG.

Discovery and modeling career[link]

Dahl was discovered by Isabella Blow, a Vogue stylist. Blow referred Dahl to Sarah Doukas of the Storm Model Agency in London. Dahl appeared in campaigns for Versace, Alexander McQueen, Patrick Cox, Pringle, Godiva, Banana Republic, and Gap, amongst others. She was featured prominently in many large-circulation magazines, including Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire and the British, Italian and American versions of Vogue.^[2] Dahl worked with several well-known photographers, including Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel. She appeared in several high-fashion editorials for magazines such as Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Visionaire, and W, and was featured on the covers of British and Italian Vogue. In 2000, Dahl achieved a degree of notoriety when Tom Ford and Steven Meisel cast her in an advertisement for the Yves Saint-Laurent perfume brand Opium. The ad featured a photograph of her posing nude on black satin. It was removed from UK billboards after complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority.^[3]

Writing[link]

She is a columnist for British Vogue (winning a Jasmine Award for her column) and Waitrose Kitchen and has contributed to, among other publications, The Saturday Times Magazine, The Daily Telegraph and the American edition of Vogue.

In 2003 Dahl published her first book, an illustrated novella and Times bestseller, The Man with the Dancing Eyes. After this she began writing regularly for publications such as American Vogue, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Observer and the Saturday Times. From 2005 Dahl was a contributing editor and regular columnist at Men's Vogue, prior to its closure in 2008. Dahl is the author of three other books: Playing with the Grown-Ups (2008) and two cook books, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights (2009) and From Season To Season (2011). She was a contributor to an anthology, Truth or Dare edited by Justine Picardie, which included works by Zoë Heller and William Fiennes. She also provided introductions to the Puffin Classic new edition of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and the Virago Press re-issue of Stella Gibbons' 1938 novel Nightingale Wood, which was released in April 2009.

In March and April 2010, her six-part cookery series entitled The Delicious Miss Dahl, which Dahl wrote and presented, was broadcast on BBC 2. She also wrote and presented a television programme about the Victorian cook, Isabella Beeton which was transmitted on BBC2 on 29 September 2011.^[4]

Family history and personal life[link]

Dahl is a patron of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and supports the charities The Place2be, First Story, GOSH, NSPCC, RSPCA & Break Through Breast Cancer.

She is the daughter of actor Julian Holloway and writer Tessa Dahl. Her maternal grandparents were author Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal and her paternal grandparents were actor-comedian Stanley Holloway and actress and chorus dancer Violet Lane.^[5]

On 9 January 2010 she married singer Jamie Cullum.^[6] On 2 March 2011, Dahl and Cullum had their first child, a girl named Lyra.^[7]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Sophie Dahl's website
• Sophie Dahl at the Fashion Model Directory
• Vincent Graff meets Sophie Dahl (The Guardian)
• Interview with Kate Lauer (The London Paper)
• Jenny Tucker reviews Voluptuous Delights (so Feminine)
• Announcement of BBC cookery series (The Telegraph)
• Announcement of 'Miss Dahl’s Guide to All Things Lovely' (The Bookseller)
• I'm a bit of a dork: Kira Cochrane talks to Sophie Dahl (The Guardian)

Arnold Bennett
Born	1867 Hanley, Staffordshire, England
Died	1931 Chiltern Court, London
Cause of death	Typhoid
Occupation	Novelist

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film.

Early life[link]

Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley is one of a conurbation of six towns which joined together at the beginning of the twentieth century as Stoke-on-Trent. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family were able to move to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem.^[1] Bennett was educated locally in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Arnold was employed by his father—his duties included rent collecting. He was unhappy working for his father for little financial reward, and the theme of parental miserliness is important in his novels. In his spare time he was able to do a little journalism, but his breakthrough as a writer was to come after he had moved from the Potteries. At the age of twenty-one, he left his father's practice and went to London as a solicitor's clerk.

Career[link]

Journalism and nonfiction[link]

Bennett won a literary competition in Tit-Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full time. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial which was bought by the syndicate for 75 pounds. He then wrote another. This became The Grand Babylon Hotel. Just over four years later, his first novel, A Man from the North, was published to critical acclaim and he became editor of the magazine.

From 1900 he devoted himself full time to writing, giving up the editorship. He continued to write journalism despite the success of his career as a novelist. In 1926, at the suggestion of Lord Beaverbrook, he began writing an influential weekly article on books for the Evening Standard newspaper.

As well as the novels, much of Bennett's non-fiction work has stood the test of time. One of his most popular non-fiction works, which is still read to this day, is the self-help book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. His diaries have yet to be published in full, but extracts from them are often quoted in the British press.^[2]

Move to France[link]

In 1903, he moved to Paris, where other great artists from around the world had converged on Montmartre and Montparnasse. Bennett spent the next eight years writing novels and plays. Bennett believed that ordinary people had the potential to be the subject of interesting books. In this respect, an influence which Bennett himself acknowledged was the French writer Maupassant whose "Une Vie" inspired "The Old Wives' Tale." Maupassant is also one of the writers on whom Richard Larch, the protagonist of Bennett's first (and obviously semi-autobiographical) novel, A Man from the North, tries in vain to model his own writing.

In 1908 The Old Wives' Tale was published and was an immediate success throughout the English-speaking world. After a visit to America in 1911, where he had been publicized and acclaimed as no other visiting writer since Dickens, he returned to England where Old Wives' Tale was reappraised and hailed as a masterpiece.

Public service[link]

During the First World War he became Director of Propaganda for France at the Ministry of Information. (At that time the word propaganda did not have the negative implications it acquired later in the twentieth century). His appointment was made directly on the recommendation of Lord Beaverbrook, who also recommended him as Deputy Minister of that Department at the end of the war.^[3] He refused a knighthood in 1918.

Osbert Sitwell,^[4] in a letter to James Agate,^[5] notes that Bennett was not, despite current views, "the typical businessman, with his mean and narrow outlook." Sitwell cited a letter from Bennett to a friend of Agate, who remains anonymous, in Ego 5:

I find I am richer this year than last; so I enclose a cheque for 500 pounds for you to distribute among young writers and artists and musicians who may need the money. You will know, better than I do, who they are. But I must make one condition, that you do not reveal that the money has come from me, or tell anyone about it.

Final years[link]

He separated from his French wife in 1922 and fell in love with the actress Dorothy Cheston, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. He won the 1923 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Riceyman Steps.

He died of typhoid at his home in Baker Street, London, on 27 March 1931, after returning from a visit^[6] to France. His ashes are buried in Burslem cemetery. Their daughter, Virginia Eldin, lived in France and was president of the Arnold Bennett Society.

References to the potteries in his works[link]

In 1902, Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries, appeared. His most famous works are the Clayhanger trilogy and The Old Wives' Tale. These books draw on his experience of life in the Potteries, as did most of his best work. In his novels the Potteries are referred to as "the Five Towns"; Bennett felt that the name was more euphonious than "the Six Towns" so Fenton was omitted. The real towns and their Bennett counterparts are:

All but one of these are mild disguises; "Knype" may possibly be taken from the nearby village of Knypersley near Biddulph, and Knypersley Hall. Neighbouring Oldcastle, where Edwin Clayhanger went to school, is Newcastle under Lyme. Axe, towards which Tertius Ingpen lived, is Leek.

Several of his books set in the Potteries have been made into films (for example The Card starring Alec Guinness) and television mini-series (such as "Anna of the Five Towns" and "Clayhanger").

Criticism[link]

Critically, Bennett has not always had an easy ride. His output was prodigious and, by his own admission, based on maximizing his income rather than from creative necessity.

As Bennett put it:

Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art’s sake, they are cruelly deceived.

Contemporary critics—Virginia Woolf in particular—perceived weaknesses in his work. To her and other Bloomsbury authors, Bennett represented the "old guard" in literary terms. His style was traditional rather than modern, which made him an obvious target for those challenging literary conventions.^[7][8] Max Beerbohm criticized him as a social climber who had forgotten his origins. He drew a mature and well fed Bennett expounding, "All to plan, you see" to a younger tougher version of himself, who replies: "Yes—but MY plan."

For much of the 20th Century, Bennett's work was tainted by this perception; it was not until the 1990s that a more positive view of his work became widely accepted. The noted English critic John Carey was a major influence on his rehabilitation. He praises him in his 1992 book, The Intellectuals and the Masses. ISBN 978-0-571-16926-9. , declaring Bennett to be his "hero" because his writings "represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals' case against the masses" (p. 152).

Quotations[link]

• My mother is far too clever to understand anything she doesn't like.
• Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

List of works[link]

For further guidance consult Studies in the Sources of Arnold Bennett's Novels by Louis Tillier (Didier, Paris 1949), and Arnold Bennett and Stoke-on-Trent by E. J. D. Warrilow (Etruscan Publications, 1966). Also, Arnold Bennett: A Biography by Margaret Drabble (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1974).

In gastronomy[link]

Bennett is one of a select number of celebrities to have a dish named after them. While staying at the Savoy Hotel in London, the chefs perfected an omelette incorporating smoked haddock, Parmesan cheese and cream, which pleased the author so much he insisted on it being prepared wherever he travelled. The 'Omelette Arnold Bennett' has remained a Savoy standard dish ever since.^[9]

The George Hotel in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, has a restaurant named after Bennett. It is adorned with Arnold Bennett photographs and memorabilia.

Other geographical links[link]

• 1907/8 Paris: Old Wives Tale written here.
• 1908 French Riviera: convalescence after typhoid fever. Married and moved to Fountainbleau.
• 1914: Camarques, Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex coast: here he had the yacht Velsa and trips from this 'home in the country' to Frinton-on-Sea gave rise to one of the characters in The Price of Love.
• 1917 Bennett's bachelor pad is at Thames Yacht Club: a couple of rooms 'furnished to his own taste'
• 1920 A month trip to Portugal with Frank Swinnerton, as Bennett was at a particularly low ebb.
• May–June 1926, Bennett stayed in the village of Amberley, West Sussex where he wrote the last two thirds of The Vanguard in 44 days, noting 'I have never worked more easily than in the last six weeks.^[10][11]
• 1928 house rented in Le Touquet for the summer^[12]

London

• Strand Palace Hotel London: on London trips, he frequented as it offered a bedside light during his periods of insomnia.
• His wife Marguerite's London flat was over a bank on the corner of New Oxford Street and Rathbone Place.
• "large flat" George Street, Hanover Square, which subsequently Marguerite came to live in
• 1921-ish: 75, Cadogan Square; Dorothy moved in here. From here, they moved in 1930 (according to plaque on the building) to Chiltern Court, an "impressive block of flats" at Baker Street Railway Station (where H. G. Wells also lived).
• 1931 Bennett dies at Chiltern Court on March 26.^[13]

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Arnold Bennett

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Arnold Bennett

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Arnold Bennett

• Works by Arnold Bennett at Project Gutenberg
• Arnold Bennett's biography by his biographer Frank Swinnerton
• The Potteries
• Portraits of Arnold Bennett at the National Portrait Gallery (London).
• Omelette Arnold Bennett A late supper dish that was created at the Savoy Hotel specially for Mr. Bennett
• The Literary Debate Between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf
• Stoke-on-Trent Museums cares for a historic collection of Benett's letters and personal effects
• Images of England Photo of the Bennett family home
• Free book downloads in HTML, PDF, text formats at ebooktakeaway.com
• Public domain audio books of works by Arnold Bennett at Librivox
• Arnold Bennett Society