Sacred and Profane Love

by Arnold Bennett

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Genres: Classics, Fiction

180 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 7, 2009

About the author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. 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).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never realized how much love resembles hiking in the mountains. There are steep and precarious peaks, and valleys dark enough to make you lose your footing. It can be breathtaking, terrifying, and humbling all at once. In Sacred and Profane Love, Arnold Bennett takes us on that climb, following Carlotta through her life and the loves that shape it.

The story is told entirely in Carlotta’s first-person voice. Bennett’s prose is vivid and luscious, allowing her to reveal her deepest thoughts and most private feelings. It works beautifully, though I sometimes wondered whether he truly understood women. Still, I’m wise enough to know that I am not all women, and Carlotta could easily have been a real woman in her time. She isn’t always likable, but she’s a fascinating study in how love can be both selfish and selfless. Her lovers feel believable in their flaws, yet I never quite saw their virtues, and I couldn’t connect them to anyone I might know in real life.

Bennett’s writing reflects Carlotta’s emotional world with a kind of elegant intensity. His sentences are long and layered, but they flow in a way that feels musical. The effect is immersive rather than heavy, drawing the reader close enough to feel her shifting moods and quiet realizations. I can understand how some readers might find it dense, yet I never felt confined by it. Instead, I felt invited to understand her. That’s what makes the book work, because its language carries her honesty better than any third-person narration could.

What struck me most about Sacred and Profane Love wasn’t just Carlotta herself, but what Bennett seems to be saying about love and life as a whole. It’s never purely sacred or purely profane, never wholly spiritual or physical, and no philosophy, whether moral, artistic, or romantic, can fully contain the feelings that come with it. Love is a tangled ball of yarn, and Bennett captures that confusion with surprising honesty for his time.

I came away from this book with mixed feelings, and that’s what makes it a good one. It doesn’t hand you easy answers about love or art. It just shows people doing their best to make sense of both. I didn’t always like Carlotta, but I believed her, and that counts for more in my books. Readers who appreciate introspective fiction and early twentieth-century realism will find plenty to admire in Bennett’s restraint and emotional insight.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book chosen from the many free ones available for the Kindle.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked this one up. In spite of the way it's tagged or shelved by some others, I would not classify it as either "feminist" or "erotica." If you're looking for a steamy read, this is not going to satisfy.

Protagonist Carlotta Peel is not a typical woman. Bennett wrote this around the turn of the 20th century, decades before the you-go-girl era of feminism, so it's unfair to judge it completely by today's standards. Carlotta flouts conventions almost unapologetically, living on her own as an author at an age and during an era when women still needed a chaperon to maintain propriety. She endeavors forward with little hesitation and is usually ready to be straightforward with consequences. Though there is some dialogue, most of the story is constructed of her (sometimes very pathetic) introspection.

Yet, Carlotta appears to believe her ultimate satisfaction is in feeling that she's sublimated her ambition and desires to those of her lovers, to men. "For you I will be nothing but a woman," she says. And later, "Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent, self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything!" she narrates. It is questionable, though, if being the plaything is really her ultimate accomplishment. Wealth, personal success, fame, love, the ability to do as one pleases, interesting experiences, artistic accomplishment, altruistic acts, self pride/confidence -- all worthy goals, but does she fail in any of them or really find a greater gratification in any one of these over the others?

I am interested that this doesn't appear to be a cautionary tale and that there is much less of a didactic undertone than I expected. Carlotta's self-second-guessing, hesitation, and regrets are things anyone experiences even today. I looked for some literary criticism regarding the piece online, but there isn't much. Somewhere in my searching, I read that the author was prolific and was most concerned about making a profit, so I'd lean toward the idea that this is meant to be an entertaining tale versus something with an underlying moral motive.

The prose is . . . not exactly flowery, maybe "wordy" is a better term, and often (as I said before) pathetic. It's a story about a European woman written by a man. It's a first person view. I found myself putting it down quite often or reading something else in the meantime, but I was curious about where Bennett was going to take the thing. I'm glad it was free.

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The burning question (this book is full of burning, usually passion, indicated by ellipses) is whether Bennett was seriously trying to write a book in the style of Therese Raquin, say, or whether he was parodying the likes of Ouida and Marie Corelli. Surely the author of 'The Card', one of my favourite novels, cannot have really been trying to reproduce the emotions of a profoundly silly and hysterical young woman? But it's so badly done that I'm afraid he was.

[Scout · Rating 4 out of 5]

In three acts. What a wild ride. I couldn't put it down. I am not one to write a spoiler but I will say that:

Act 1: loss of virginity, as described in circumspect yet undeniable terms.
Act 2: Unrequited and unfulfilled love with a married man
Act 3: Is the real kicker - finish reading it at 3AM