Bennett wrote in a wide range of genres but, along with his contemporaries, George Gissing, H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, he specialised in realistic descriptions of the day-to-day lives and dilemmas of ordinary people. His first novel, published in 1898, established his reputation as a realist writer. The story follows the fate of Richard Larch, the eponymous ‘man from the North’, as he attempts to make his fortune as a writer on London’s literary scene.
As an aspiring author from the North himself, Bennett surely drew on personal experience. As well as being partly autobiographical, however, the novel is also part of a tradition of late-Victorian fiction that sought to expose the difficulties facing professional authors as they tried to balance artistic integrity with the need to earn a living – a tradition that includes novels as different as Gissing’s classic New Grub Street (1891) and Marie Corelli’s bestselling The Sorrows of Satan (1895).