Province, metropolis, and the literary career of Phyllis Bentley in the 1930s

In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writes the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a 'middlebrow' novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the 'provincial' and the 'metropolitan'. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elits ; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.