Phyllis Eleanor Bentley OBE (1894-1977) was an English novelist.
Born on November 19, 1894, the youngest child of Joseph Edwin Bentley, a mill owner, and his wife Eleanor, Bentley grew up in Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire. She was educated at Halifax High School for Girls and Cheltenham Ladies’ College. During World War I, she worked in the munitions industry. After the war, she returned to her native Halifax where she taught English and Latin.
In 1918, she published her first work, a collection of short stories entitled The World’s Bane. Her first novel, Environment, was published in 1922. She published one of her best-known works, Inheritance, in 1932; set against the background of the development of the textile industry in the West Riding, the novel received widespread critical acclaim and ran through twenty-three impressions by 1946, making her the first successful English regional novelist since Thomas Hardy had written his Wessex novels.
Two further novels followed in 1946 and 1966, forming a trilogy, and in 1967 Inheritance was filmed by Granada TV, with John Thaw and James Bolam in leading roles. In 1968, she wrote the children’s novel Gold Pieces, a fictionalised account—as seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy—of the Cragg Coiners, who defrauded the government by clipping the edges of gold coins to melt down and make into new coins.
Bentley wrote 24 detective short stories featuring Miss Marian Phipps, beginning with “The Missing Character” for Woman’s Home Companion in 1937 and continuing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from the early 1950s to the early 1970s.
She was made an honorary Doctor of Letters from Leeds University in 1949, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1958. She was appointed an OBE in 1970.
Phyllis Bentley passed away on June 27, 1977, aged 82.
