What a pleasant surprise to find this gem from the early part of the 20th Century.

This book is the small details in life. Two sisters - of a mercantile family - lead very different lives. One stays in Bursley her whole life. And the other one scandalously elopes with a less than honorable traveling salesman. Late in life the two sisters reunite. Sophia reflects on her leaving and returning to Bursley Square:

Her return was accepted with indifference. Her escapade of thirty years ago entirely lost its dramatic quality. Many people indeed never heard that she had run away from to marry a commercial traveler; and to those who remembered, or had been told, it seemed a sufficiently banal exploit--after thirty years! Her fear, and Constance's that the town would be murmurous gossip was ludicrously unfounded. The effect of time was such that even Mr Critchlow (the local doctor) appeared to have forgotten even that she had been indirectly responsible for her father's death. She had nearly forgotten it herself; when she happened to think about it she felt no shame, no remorse, seeing the death as purely accidental, and not altogether unfortunate.

This passage represents much of how I think about this book. It focus on details. Even the big scandalous events are with the passage of time made into simple choices.

Another great example of details and then an insight into the character:

Constance's eyes suddenly filled with tears.
'Ye'd had Spot a long time, hadn't ye?' he said sympathetically.
She nodded. 'When I was married,' said she, 'the first thing my husband did was to buy a fox-terrier, and ever since we've always had a fox-terrier in the house.' This was not true, but Constance was firmly convinced of its truth.

Rather slow but good character development and insight into the period.

"And now she was sending telegrams from a place called Charing Cross!” This is Mrs Baines of her daughter, Sophia, when she elopes from her Staffordshire home with a commercial traveller, leaving her sister, Constance, to a more conventional life in Bursley. The novel opens with a re-orientating of geography away from London to the Potteries in the 1860s, and "The Old Wives Tale" is very good, indeed, on provincialism, and the great changes overtaking towns: the expansion of railways; electric tramways linking the Five Towns and bringing the threat of “federation”, as well as, more immediately, taking trade away from Bursley; and such accompaniments to trade as advertising, display and increasing competition, with Baines’ eventually losing out to Midland Clothiers, with the latter’s tactics of targeted, bulk-merchandising.

These are fundamental changes but they inform, rather than drive the story of the novel, that of the two sisters. The overall impression is of routine domestic matters: gossip, family relationships, aging, aches and pains (and complaints), and comings-and-goings. And yet, this is a novel that includes a murder, two executions, the siege of Paris, a failed escape from the city by balloon, and an attempted suicide.

Arnold Bennett is sometimes in the shadow of Dickens, James, Eliot, Austen, Trollope, and Thackeray (in current football terms, a Stoke City to a Manchester United) but in “The Old Wives’ Tale” his great achievement is to make us care about characters whom he resists making obviously likeable or immediately remarkable or even – for some chapters – more central than other characters. The key to this success is that he takes his time: the novel follows Sophia and Constance in their often separate lives from the 1860s to the first decade of the twentieth-century (the novel was published in 1908) and while Bennett does not use experimental techniques for conveying time passing, he catches its passage, its sadness and even its terror: “It was appalling: the passage of time.”

I will certainly read Arnold Bennett’s better-known “Anna of the Five Towns” and also “Clayhanger”.

First published in 1908, this is considered one of Bennett's finest works. His breathtaking detail and description is something to behold.

The story begins around 1840 in the Stafforshire pottery town of Burslem, where young sisters Constance and Sophia Baines work in their parents' draper's shop. They are initially close but contrastingly different girls, Sophie the younger considered incorrigible by the more proper Constance. As they grow up the girls drift, mentally and geographically, apart. Later also set partly in Paris, the tale tracks each sister, separately, into the full bloom of adulthood, the prime of maturity and the frailty of their dotage. It concludes in 1905.

The book divides into four parts. The first, 'Mrs Baines', introduces the two sisters and those around them, in their bedridden father's combined shop-cum-house overlooking the town square. With their father ill, the sisters' primary parent is their mother. By the end of this section, rebellious Sophia has eloped with a travelling salesman, while obedient Constance has married her parent's shop employee, Mr Povey.

The second part, 'Constance', follows sensible Constance through to her grey-haired retirement, when she reunites with her long-lost runaway sister. Her unremarkable life is defined not by adventure or outstanding accomplishments, but by deeply personal events, such as her husband's death, her growing worries over her son's life decisions and social behaviour.

The third part, 'Sophia', follows passionate young Sophia after her elopement. Deserted in Paris by her husband, she survives the odds, becoming a successful pensione proprietor.

The fourth part, 'What Life Is', sees the two sisters reunite. Worldly old Sophia finally returns to her Burslem childhood home, which plain old Constance has never left.

It's mindboggling that one man could have created so much intricate detail in these wonderful Victorian characters. How on earth did he achieve this?

In his initial published introduction, Bennett mentioned his debt to Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie (that same introduction originally included a nod to W. K. [Lucy] Clifford's Aunt Anne, but her mention is intermittently omitted from various subsequent editions and is permanently absent by the 1983 edition). Bennett's inspiration for the actual story was triggered by a chance encounter in a Paris restaurant, as he recounts:

...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.
I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: 'This woman was once

young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she.' Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque—far from it!—but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.

Perfect in every way, I have never read anything in this category that surpasses this in literary quality or storytelling. Why this is not more famously celebrated I can't imagine. No major updated screen adaption has eventuated since the 1921 film The Old Wives' Tale starring Fay Compton, Florence Turner and Henry Victor, other than the 1988 BBC TV series Sophia and Constance starring Alfred Burke, Lynsey Beauchamp and Katy Behean.

I adore this oft overlooked great classic. Everyone should read it at least once in their life.

The start of this is very slow with much description. I wondered if I'd started another which would be a slog. Not a bit of it, I'm happy to report. Primarily characterization with some small plot to go with it, it is no wonder this is on both Bloom's Western Canon and Boxall's 1001 Books - and maybe other lists, too.

Bennett gives us the inspiration for his story in a preface to the edition I read, wherein he states that he frequented a certain restaurant in Paris. ... an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. ... I reflected concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Her case is a tragedy." He then was reminded of de Maupassant's Une Vie. He thought he could make something of these two observations.

Bennett decided to write his novel about the lives of two women - sisters, who he named Constance and Sophia Baines. Their ages were sixteen and fifteen; it is an epoch when, if one if frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months. In the first about one-quarter of the novel I noticed such small witticisms. Perhaps they continue, but I stopped noticing them if they are there.

Published in 1908, it follows the lives of Constance and Sophia over the next forty plus years, from the mid-1860s to the early 20th Century. It is not a Victorian novel, although it takes place in Victorian England - he is able to say things that I think might not have gotten by Victorian censors. Her passion for him burned stronger than ever. She knew then that she did not love him for his good qualities, but for something boyish and naive that there was about him, an indescribably something that occasionally, when his face was close to hers, made her dizzy. Very tame by today's standards, yet there it is - a woman has passion, a man makes her dizzy.

I don't know that I really liked these women to the point I would have wanted to spend time with them, so much as I came to know them and respect them. I feel privileged that this has survived for me to enjoy.

‘No one but Constance could realise all that Constance had been through, and all that life had meant to her’ Loved this book :) Have such a soft spot for the silly English lady and her silly, boring, but ultimately meaningful (to her) life.

Back before the experience of the first World War taught people how painful life really was in the modern administrative world, the writers who came to prominence were of a rather different stripe than what came to be known as "the modern writer". Possibly because of a loss of self stemming from a fundamental cognitive dissonance, the successful awakening of a psychological healthy self was rendered ineffectual by a noteworthy flaw in the evolutionary development of the psyche. This can be seen in the production of sign-systems and exponentially dynamic broadening of our intellectual capacity which was accompanied by an attendant and invariant atrophying of our ability to live outside the range of available human experience. Fluctuation of volition with regard to ideological and/or and sexual object-choice can be seen as resulting directly from the dice-throw of psychological value-creation and the cultural-political alliances that were established on the basis of the huge changes that took place in the human environment in the hundred years from 1870 to 1970. Virginia Woolf's literary style consigned the works of Arnold Bennett to the ash heap of literary refuse.
However, this was not because they sufficiently failed to entertain, but because Bennett's literary style stood for the "statuefication" of the self in a world morally encompassed by a sharply-defined ethics that restricted the lives of the protagonists of his novels. Three stars.

You all know the problem. You've got some great books on your shelves that you really want to read, and you're pretty sure you're going to love them, because of author or subject matter or reputation as a classic. But it's over 500 pages, sometimes a lot over. So you pick it up, but you're aware that in the time it takes to read this one, you could probably finish 2 or 3 shorter books that you also badly want to get to. So you put that big, fat book back on the shelf and opt for the low-hanging fruit instead.

I promised myself at the beginning of 2020 that I would make it a goal to read some of these thicker books this year; I even made a list of 5 that I most wanted to read. Here it is June, and I'm just getting around to the first on this list. Yes, it's taken me 10 days, and I've ignored a lot of other things to finish, but, I have to tell you, it was SO worth it.

"One of the modern library's hundred best novels of the twentieth century" is just above the title and beautiful artwork on my edition. I'm not going to argue with them; I loved it. I loved it so much that I actually slowed my reading in the last 100 pages to make it last longer. It is the story of two sisters, 15 and 16 when we first meet them around 1862. Constance is shy and retiring, willing to conform to parental and societal expectations. Sophia, the youngest, is beautiful, headstrong and adventurous. Constance marries and she and her husband take over the family business. Sophia elopes with an unsuitable cad and runs away to Paris. The novel follows them through the next 50 years. Along with their immensely readable stories,we are treated to the changing times, customs and expectations of the last half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th in England and Paris. As in any family saga, we get births and deaths, humor and heartbreak, love, hate, jealousy, horrible life changing mistakes, incredible pieces of luck, aging, everything that makes human beings so vulnerable. All by the hands of a wonderful writer.

"It recalled Sophia to a sense of the inner mysteries of life, reminding her somehow that humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses". That quote is a little too close for comfort given the current state of our world, simply because of the realization of it's truth.

I am so sad to leave Constance and Sophia's world. The consolation of a big, thick book is worth the cost in time.

I happened on this short book* as a library recommendation based on my reading preferences. I'd never heard of the author, Arnold Bennett, but enjoyed his writing style. The story was realistic in its depiction of negative consequences for negative choices. Definitely not an "and they lived happily ever after" book, but I'm glad I read it.

* Just found out the audiobook edition I listened to was abridged. I wish I'd known; I always choose unabridged books when given the choice. I did think this was a very short book (2 hours) and seemed to breeze through time/scenes quickly. I may have to search out the unabridged version to see what I missed...

A wonderful book. No summary can do it justice -- on the surface it is so utterly mundane, and yet Bennett packs entire lives into a few pages, sketches characters deftly and makes it all so entirely believable. Storytelling does not get any more polished than this.

I set off on a cycle ride and had this book in the bag. At the end of each day I'd eat some cheese and biscuits and an apple and read a chunk of this. The first few chapters were read in Haworth, the second section, when I really began to get into the story, was read in the sunshine, by the river, at Bolton Abbey. I continued through upper Wharfedale and Wensleydale and into Westmoreland, each day getting more and more into this remarkable book. I read it at the birthplace of Robert the Bruce and where Dorothy L Sayers wrote her Scottish mystery. I read it on the ferry to Northern Ireland and finished it in a hotel in Larne. I missed it very much as I continued through the Sperrin mountains without it. Constance and Sophia were the most delightful of travelling companions.