Phyllis Bentley's novels and stories trace the development of the textile industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. According to Bentley in The English Regional Novel (1941), the regional novel is "essentially democratic" and "expresses a belief that the ordinary man and the ordinary woman are interesting and worth depicting." While her works are not much read today, the prolific Bentley was well respected in her time. Her more than forty published books include both fiction and nonfiction, but it was as a novelist that she was primarily known during her lifetime. Today she is most widely recognized for her literary criticism, especially her work on the Brontë family.

Born in Halifax in the West Riding on 19 November 1894, Phyllis Eleanor Bentley considered herself part of the "middle of the middle class." Her father, Joseph Edwin Bentley, was a textile manufacturer; the...