Virginia Woolf was a snob. Her attacks on the English novelist, playwright, editor, and critic Arnold Bennett were rooted not in literary merit, but in social class. This becomes especially clear when we discover—for the first time—the truth behind Bennett, King George V, wartime propaganda, and the mystery of the knighthood that never was.

The Woolf–Bennett imbroglio was one-sided but bitter, and Bennett is widely held to have been the loser. It is Virginia Woolf whose reputation is today by far the greater as both the doyenne of the Bloomsbury Group and the high priestess of modernist literature. At the time of the dustup, however, it was Bennett who was the more famous and successful of the two. Their situations were then very publicly reversed: Woolf damaged his reputation and emerged—seemingly—the victor.

On the face of it, this was a quarrel about character and realism in literature, a public face-off between old and new ways of writing fiction. At bottom, however, it was a disagreement not about literary value but ambition, reputation, recognition, and, above all, social class. Woolf had no time for Bennett, a self-made man from the provinces who needed to write for a living—and a very good living at that.

On the face of it, this was a quarrel about character and realism in literature.

In all of this, Woolf was the antagonist while Bennett was an easy and publicity-friendly target due to his wealth and fame. But, ultimately,