Realism of the 20th century was peculiar with the influence of modernism and psychologism. However, it was characterized by its attention to details, as well as its attempt to recreate reality as it was, without any decorative language. It tried to reproduce the most detail and objective life of Great Britain before and after World Wars. Realism represented the social life and paid much attention to domestic problems. Its representatives showed tragic vision of life using satire and dark humour, but still their vision of life is much more optimistic than the modernistic one. Talking about their characters, they were social types depicted in their everyday life dealing with their virtues, morals, profession, relationships, worldview etc. Narrative form used by realists is characterized by several narrative characters in order to create an objective vision of life. The most prominent among the writers who continued the traditions of realism were: J. Galsworthy, A. Bennett, H. Wells, B. Shaw; and their followers R. Aldington, G. Orwell, J. Priestley, and E. Waugh. The Novel is certainly the most important literary form of the period. The realistic novel is represented by such novelistic forms as: the social and social-psychological novel (J. Galsworthy, E. Waugh, R. Aldington) the social-domestic novel (A. Bennett, H. Wells) the comic or satirical novel (E. Waugh) family chronicle or epic cycle (J. Galsworthy) science fiction (H. Wells). Despite all this, realism and his representatives suffered much criticism. The main argument developed between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf. She felt that there was something missing from the works of Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells; that there was something deficient in their approach. They still followed the Victorian tradition as far as the technique of the novel is concerned. Woolf wrote, “These three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul”.
Arnold BENNETT (1867–1931) was a British novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist. Bennett was born in Hanley (27th May 1867), Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in a street called Hope Street. (A Street less hopeful would be hard to imagine.) Bennett did not pursue a career as a writer until after leaving his father's practice and moving to London in 1889 when he won a literary competition in "Tit Bits" magazine. Encouraged to take up journalism full-time he became assistant editor of "Woman" in 1894. Just over four years later, in 1898, his first novel "A Man from the North" was published. Its protagonist moves south from Bursley to London, intent upon pursuing a career as a writer. The success of his novel allowed Bennett to give up other work and to concentrate on writing. His first novel was followed in 1902 by "Anna of the Five Towns", the first of a succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries. Between the end of 1903 and 1911 Bennett lived mainly in Paris. During this time he continued to enjoy critical success with the publication of many novels including "The Old Wives Tale" (1908). Bennett was less successful in his plays, although Milestones (1912), written with Edward Knoblock, and The Great Adventure (1913), adapted from his novel of five years earlier, Buried Alive (1908), both had long runs. He is also famous for his essays ‘Journalism for women’, ‘Fame and fiction’, ‘How to become and author’. Bennett’s output was prodigious and, by his own admission, based on maximising his income rather than from creative necessity. As Bennett put it: “Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art’s sake, they are cruelly deceived”. Arnold Bennett is a representative of British realism though he considered himself to be a naturalist. As a young writer he learned his craft from intensive study of the French realistic novelists, especially Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, who emphasized detailed description of people, scenes, and events. Bennett is best known for his novels which are also characterised by a detailed description of scene, events and characters. His enduring fame is as a Chronicler of the Potteries towns, the setting and inspiration of some of his most famous literary work and the place where he grew up. His native town Hanley became the real-life model for one of the "Five Towns" of his novels. It wasn’t until he had left the Potteries that Bennett even thought of them as material for fiction, until he read George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife. He wrote to Moore ‘I wish also to tell you that it was the first chapters of A Mummer’s Wife which opened my eyes to the romantic nature of the district I had blindly inhabited for over twenty years. You are indeed the father of all my Five Town books’. As early as 1893 Bennett had used the “Five Towns” as background for a story. Tales of the Five Towns is a selection of short stories recounting, with gentle satire and tolerant good humour, the small town provincial life at the end of the nineteenth century, based around the six towns in the county of Staffordshire, England, known as the Potteries. Arnold Bennett chose to fictionalize these towns by changing their names and omitting one (Fenton) as he apparently felt that “Five Towns” was more euphonious than “Six Towns”. The real town names which are thinly disguised in the novel are: Hanley, Longton, Burslem and Tunstal, the fifth, Stoke, became “Knype”. Arnold Bennett never returned to the Potteries except on brief visits, but he continued to live there imaginatively, much as Joyce did in Dublin. Although Bennett never returned to the Potteries to live he never forgot the debt which he owed to his birthplace for giving him a unique setting for so many of his novels, a setting which he enhanced with his penetrating description of people and places. Bennett wrote 30 novels but is best known for his highly detailed novels of the “Five Towns”. His major novels – Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and Clayhanger 1910; included with its successors, Hilda Lessways, 1911, and These Twain, 1916, in The Clayhanger Family,1925 – have their setting there. The only exception being Riceyman Steps (1923), set in a lower-middle-class district of London. The Old Wives' Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, into old age. It is generally regarded as one of Bennett's finest works. It covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Burslem and Paris. Bennett was initially inspired to write the book by a chance encounter in a Parisian restaurant. In the introduction to the book, he says: “...an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless”. Plot details. The book is broken up into four parts. The first section, "Mrs Baines" details the adolescence of both Sophia and Constance, and their life in their father's shop and house (a combined property). The father is ill and bedridden, and the main adult in their life is Mrs Baines, their mother. By the end of the first book, Sophia (whose name reflects her sophistication, as opposed to the constant Constance) has eloped with a travelling salesman. Constance meanwhile marries Mr Povey, who works in the shop. The second part, "Constance", details the life of Constance from that point forward up until the time she is reunited with her sister in old age. Her life, although outwardly prosaic, is nevertheless filled with personal incident, including the death of her husband, Mr Povey, and her concerns about the character and behaviour of her son. The third part, "Sophia", carries forward the story of what happened to Sophia after her elopement. Abandoned by her husband in Paris, Sophia eventually becomes the owner of a successful pension. The final part, "What Life Is", details how the two sisters are eventually reunited. Sophia returns to England and the house of her childhood, where Constance still lives.

CRITICISM. Contemporary critics – V. Woolf in particular – perceived weaknesses in Bennett’s work. To her and other Bloomsbury authors, Bennett represented the "old guard" in literary terms. His style was traditional rather than modern, which made him an obvious target for those who liked to present themselves as 'challenging literary conventions'. Bennett in his turn regarded the Bloomsberries as decadents, whose vices and general sense of life were contrary to the optimism and decency he saw in the mass of people. For much of the 20th Century, Bennett's work was affected by the Bloomsburies' perception; it was not until the 1990s that a more positive view of his work became widely accepted. The English critic John Carey was a major influence on his rediscovery. He praises him in his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses, declaring Bennett to be his "hero" because his writings "represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals' case against the masses". Herbert G. WELLS (1866-1946) is known as an English author, futurist, essayist, historian, socialist, and teacher. No field of writing was foreign to him. He was one of the foremost thinkers of his time, and his works included excursions into history, social science, commentary, and futurism. H.G. Wells came from a working class background. His father played professional cricket and ran a hardware store for a time. Wells's parents were often worried about his poor health. They were afraid that he might die young, as his older sister had. At the age of 7, Wells had an accident that left him bedridden for several months. During this time, the avid young reader went through many books, including some by Washington Irving and Charles Dickens. After Wells father's shop failed, his family, which included two older brothers, struggled financially. The boys were apprenticed to a draper, and his mother went to work on an estate as a housekeeper. At his mother's workplace, Wells discovered the owner's extensive library. He read the works of Jonathan Swift and some of the important figures of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire. In his early teens, Wells also went to work as a draper's assistant. He hated the job and eventually quitted much to his mother's dismay. Turning to teaching, Wells soon found a way to continue his own studies. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science where he learned about physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, among other subjects. Wells also devoted much of his time to becoming a writer. During college, he published a short story about time travel called "The Chronic Argonauts", which foreshadowed his future literary success.

Literary Success. In 1895, Wells became an overnight literary sensation with the publication of the novel The Time Machine. The book is about an English scientist who develops a time travel machine. While entertaining, the work also explored social and scientific topics, from class conflict to evolution. These themes recurred in some of his other popular works from this time.

H. Wells’s literary career can be divided into 2 periods:
Before World War 1, when he wrote science fiction novels (scientific romances) such as Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). These novels tell about scientific, social development and the influence of those scientific discoveries on society. Very often they lead to the humanity collapse. He developed the ideas of religion, education, nature, Darwinism and gave a very detailed description of non existing machines. The Island of Doctor Moreau told the story of a man who encounters a scientist conducting the gruesome experiments on animals, creating new species of creatures. In The Invisible Man, Wells explores the life of another scientist who undergoes a dark personal transformation after turning himself invisible. The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel with the first-person narrative of the adventures of an unnamed protagonist and his brother in Surrey and London as Earth is invaded by Martians. Written between 1895 and 1897, it is one of the earliest stories that detail a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon. The War of the Worlds has two parts, Book One: The Coming of the Martians and Book Two: The Earth under the Martians. The narrator, a philosophically-inclined author, struggles to return to his wife while seeing the Martians lay waste to southern England. Book One also imparts the experience of his brother, also unnamed, who describes events in the capital and escapes the Martians by boarding a ship near Tillingham, on the Essex coast. The plot has been related to invasion literature of the time. The novel has been variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British Imperialism, and generally Victorian superstitions, fears and prejudices. The novel also dramatises the ideas of race presented in Social Darwinism, in that the Martians exercise over humans their 'rights' as a superior race, more advanced in evolution. The War of the Worldslater caused a panic when an adaptation of the tale was broadcast on American radio. On Halloween night of 1938, Orson Welles went on the air with his version of The War of the Worlds, claiming that aliens had landed in New Jersey.

Besides, Wells explored issues of social class and economic disparity having created social-domestic novels: ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ (1899), ‘Kips’ (1905), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), a comic novel. Kipps was one of Wells's favourites of his own work. Also, he wrote the last utopia of the 20th century- ‘Men Like Gods’.

Politically, Wells supported socialist ideals. For a time, he was a member of the Fabian Society, a group that sought social reform and believed that the best political system was socialism.

In addition to his fiction, Wells wrote many essays, articles and nonfiction books. He served as a book reviewer for the Saturday Review for several years, during which time he promoted the careers of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. In 1901, Wells published a non-fiction book called Anticipations. This collection of predictions has proved to be remarkably accurate. Wells forecasted the rise of major cities and suburbs, economic globalization, and aspects of future military conflicts. Remarkably, considering his support for women and women's rights, Wells did not predict the rise of women in the workplace.

After World War 1 He wrote mainly non-fiction, vision of war, essays on history: The outline of history. Social, satirical and philosophical novels: ‘ Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island’ (1928), ‘The Croquet Player’—antifascist novel (1936). In 1920, H.G. Wells published The Outline of History, perhaps his best selling work during his lifetime. This three-volume tome began with prehistory and followed the world's events up through World War I. Wells believed there would be another major war to follow, and included his ideas for the future. Lobbying for a type of global socialism, he suggested the creation of a single government for the entire world. Around this time, Wells also tried to advance his political ideas in the real world. He ran for Parliament as a Labour Party candidate in 1922 and 1923, but both efforts ended in failure. An internationally famous intellectual and author, Wells travelled widely. He visited Russia in 1920 where he met with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. More than a decade later, Wells had the opportunity to talk with Josef Stalin and American president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also lectured and went on speaking tours, gaining notoriety for his radical social and political views. Taking a break from war-torn London in 1940, Wells came to the United States. He delivered a talk entitled "Two Hemispheres—One World."
For roughly 50 years, Wells devoted his life to writing and his output during this time was amazing. Some even criticized Wells for his tremendous volume of work, saying that he spread his talent too thin. Wells wrote, on average, three books a year for a time. And each of his works went through several drafts before publication. Wells remained productive until the very end of his life, but his attitude seemed to darken in his final days. Among his last works was 1945's "Mind at the End of Its Tether," a pessimistic essay in which Wells contemplates the end of humanity. At the time of his death, Wells was remembered as an author, historian and champion of certain social and political ideals. So many of his predictions for the future came true in the ensuing years that he is sometimes called "the Father of Futurism." But today is best known as "the Father of Science Fiction." Wells's fantastical tales continue to fascinate audiences. Several of his works have returned to the big screen in recent years.