During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).

Enoch Bennett's early career had been one of mixed fortunes: after an unsuccessful attempt to run a business making and selling pottery, he set up as a draper and pawnbroker in 1866.

[3] He became adept in Pitman's shorthand, a skill much sought after in commercial offices,[7] and on the strength of that he secured a post as a clerk at a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.

As his biographer Margaret Drabble puts it: The informal office life of the magazine suited Bennett, not least because it brought him into lively female company, and he began to be a little more relaxed with young women.

[20] In 1900 Bennett resigned his post at Woman, and left London to set up house at Trinity Hall Farm, near the village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire, where he made a home not only for himself but for his parents and younger sister.

[41][n 4] Lucas comments that the best of the novels written while in France – Whom God Hath Joined (1906), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), and Clayhanger (1910) – "justly established Bennett as a major exponent of realistic fiction".

[40] In 1912, after an extended stay at the Hotel Californie in Cannes,[49] during which time he wrote The Regent, a light-hearted sequel to The Card, Bennett and his wife moved from France to England.

[53] The play was strongly cast,[n 6] received highly favourable notices,[55] ran for more than 600 performances in London and over 200 in New York,[56] and made Bennett a great deal of money.

[40] He was still writing novels, however: These Twain, the third in his Clayhanger trilogy, was published in 1916[59] and in 1917 he completed a sequel, The Roll Call, which ends with its hero, George Cannon, enlisting in the army.

Wartime London was the setting for Bennett's The Pretty Lady (1918), about a high-class French cocotte: although well reviewed, because of its subject-matter the novel provoked "a Hades of a row" and some booksellers refused to sell it.

[67] For much of the 1920s he was widely known to be the highest-paid literary journalist in England, contributing a weekly column to Beaverbrook's Evening Standard under the title 'Books and Persons'; according to Frank Swinnerton, these articles were "extraordinarily successful and influential ... and made a number of new reputations".

[3][40] Swinnerton writes, "Endless social engagements; inexhaustible patronage of musicians, actors, poets, and painters; the maximum of benevolence to friends and strangers alike, marked the last ten years of his life".

Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy had created and sustained their own locales, and Bennett did the same with his Five Towns, drawing on his experiences as a boy and young man.

He presented the region as "the Five Towns", which correspond closely with their originals: the real-life Burslem, Hanley, Longton, Stoke and Tunstall become Bennett's Bursley, Hanbridge, Longshaw, Knype and Turnhill.

Bennett's fiction portrays the Five Towns with what The Oxford Companion to English Literature calls "an ironic but affectionate detachment, describing provincial life and culture in documentary detail, and creating many memorable characters".

[102] And Bennett's final – and longest – novel, Imperial Palace (1930), is set in a grand London hotel reminiscent of the Savoy, whose directors assisted him in his preliminary research.

In the first are the long narratives – "freestanding, monumental artefacts" – Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger and Riceyman Steps, which "have been held in high critical regard since their publication".

[86] Koenigsberger writes that the "Fantasias" such as The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), Teresa of Watling Street (1904) and The City of Pleasure (1907), have "mostly passed from public attention along with the 'modern' conditions they exploit".

[3] In 2010 and 2011 two further volumes of Bennett's hitherto uncollected short stories were published: they range from his earliest work written in the 1890s, some under the pseudonym Sarah Volatile, to US magazine commissions from the late 1920s.

[53] By far his most successful solo effort in the theatre was The Great Adventure, based on his 1908 novel Buried Alive, which ran in the West End for 674 performances, from March 1913 to November 1914.

[107] After the First World War, Bennett wrote two plays on metaphysical questions, Sacred and Profane Love (1919, adapted from his novel) and Body and Soul (1922), which made little impression.

[110] Bennett had more success in a final collaboration with Edward Knoblock (as Knoblauch had become during the war) with Mr Prohack (1927), a comedy based on his 1922 novel; one critic wrote "I could have enjoyed the play had it run to double its length", but even so he judged the middle act weaker than the outer two.

[118] Bennett took a keen interest in the cinema, and in 1920 wrote The Wedding Dress, a scenario for a silent movie, at the request of Jesse Lasky of the Famous Players film company.

[119] It was never made, though Bennett wrote a full-length treatment, assumed to be lost until his daughter Virginia found it in a drawer in her Paris home in 1983; subsequently the script was sold to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and was finally published in 2013.

[125] In his biography of Bennett Patrick, Donovan argues that in the US "the huge appeal to the ordinary readers" of his self-help books "made his name stand out vividly from other English writers across the massive, fragmented American market.

[132][133] Of the three, Bennett drew the most opprobrium from modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis who regarded him as representative of an outmoded and rival literary culture.

[136] Hepburn countered that one of the novels most frequently praised by literary critics is Riceyman Steps (1923) set in Clerkenwell, London, and dealing with material imagined rather than observed by the author.

Subsequent winners have been Jan Edwards for her novel Winter Downs (2018), Charlotte Higgins for Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths (2019) and Lisa Blower for her story collection It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's (2020).

[45] There is a two-metre-high bronze statue of Bennett[152] outside The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, unveiled on 27 May 2017 during the events marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.

[153] There are substantial archives of Bennett's papers and artworks, including drafts, diaries, letters, photographs, and watercolours, at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent[154] and at Keele University.