Read this some years back. Two sisters - Constance and Sofia - start and end their lives together, but in-between they make wildly different choices and live wildly different lives. Exquisite story-telling and detail.

Constance and Sophia are two sisters born into the narrow but secure world of their parents' drapery business in the Potteries. The Old Wives' Tale is the story of their lives from girlhood to old age and it is a remarkable masterpiece.
The life experiences of the two are vastly different, yet in essence they end up living the same life. As products of a hard-working, respectable trading class, their values are with them for life. Bennett puts the women centre stage, and male characters are peripheral, leaving Constance and Sophia free to make their own choices.
The balance between the two stories and the parallels in detail are finely crafted and give resonance and texture. For example, hot air balloons make an appearance in both strands of the story, separated by many miles and years; and an execution features in both.
The psychological insight is acute. The account of lives lived in the Potteries between 1860 and 1908 is a fascinating and invaluable document. Is it just me, or is Arnold Bennett a hugely underrated writer?

In the forward to the book, Bennett recounts an encounter in a cafe with a woman in late middle age. Loud, overbearing, and possessed of numerous absurd idiosyncrasies, the woman seems to have presented a thoroughly ridiculous figure and became figure of mockery for the other patrons. For Bennett, the occasion prompted reflection on the many incremental steps that could have transformed a young, attractive girl into the aged buffoon and the tragedy of said transformation.

If the passage of time is a tragedy it's one universally shared, which makes it inherently funny. I think of the wisdom articulated by Mel Brooks: "Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die". So it is in this book. While the characters are suffering the small but cumulative humiliations of age, they (or the reader) can take consolation in the accompanying progression of everyone around them. The whole book is suffused in an understated hilarity predicated on the passage of time.

The story of two sisters moving through life to their twilight years. Each faces life's tribulations, and works her way through it, but it is in the end, where they reflect back, that the brilliance of this book comes out. What is life, what contributions and differences do we make, and can we adapt, or should we? These questions permeate the prose of Bennett. One of the better books I have ever read. Possibly, being in my 60's it really speaks to me.

I have finally finished this thing. So relieved. I really need to quit subjecting myself to the nauseum that is Victorian novels. Absolutely nothing happens in this book with the exception of the sections dealing with the youngest Baines daughter, Sophia.

Sophia is the only one in the family that actually lived. She left the tiny town of Bursley for, in my opinion, stupid reasons, but she left. And she lived a life worthy of talking about. Constance, the elder sister, sat around, got fat and complained about her sciatica. I think she needed a backiotomy.

Considering this book is old and if you read the introduction (at least the introduction in my copy) there is no such thing as a spoiler, so here comes a spoiler.

Arnold Bennett is a stone cold killer. Of all the characters given ample page time, they all die. And they don't die interesting deaths, they die boring old age deaths.

Here is the problem I have with Victorian novels. They all center around women. Kidding, there's more to it. They all center around women that are supposed to be bucking the societal trends for women of the time. Either they want to marry for love and not wealth (although they always marry for wealth, love just happens to be a convenience) or they are living the feminist lifestyle and can do anything that men can do aside from peeing standing up without making a big mess.

This was Sophia, she fell in love and left Bursley against her family's wishes and mine. She traveled and experienced the world, fell out of love, because it turned out her worthless cad of a husband was indeed, a worthless cad of a husband. He admitted to marrying her just so he could get inside her girdle. Thank god those times are past, have to get married just to get some nookie (right, Fred?). Now, all of that stuff happens on the second date. Intercourse happens on the second date, right?

Going on, Sophia's marriage falls apart, she becomes a successful business lady, moves back home to be with her ailing sister. Finds out that her husband, whom she hasn't seen in 36 years is ill. Travels to see his idle body, then gets sick on the ride home and dies. WTF! She was the only interesting aspect of this book. Then you go and kill her, Arnold. I hate you so much.

Anyway, I'm putting off these crappy books for awhile. Gonna read some self-help stuff that my mom gave me instead. I can already tell you that they won't help. I'm a wreck.

*As an aside, anyone else sick of coworkers not grasping the concept of the reply and reply all buttons? What's the deal? Am I right or am I right?

This was epic, a whole lifetime, so poignantly and at times written with humour. I loved it. Although what an odd note to end the tale on. The final paragraph is about the really old dog that can't be bothered to get up for its dinner, then thinks, oh, maybe I will go give it a quick sniff and see if it's worth eating.

This book really is about life, literally I guess at it tells the story of Constance and Sophia, two sisters from the midlands, who did grow to be old wives. The title doesn't necessarily sound so exciting, and maybe not so much happens, but I found this to be such an engrossing read. And I feel like he captured the two characters so well in his writing and how they changed with age and experience. It's bizarre to think how the two old women I was reading about at the end were the young impulsive and passionate young girls at the very start. How much changes over a lifetime. There's a poignant bit towards the end when Sophia goes to see her estranged and dying (turns out he's dead) husband, and after seeing the corpse, falls into a melancholia over life: "...What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that." (p 577) There's much hinted at about what is important in life - is it worrying over things or being too tied to things, such as Constance with her house; or poor Sophia who becomes so obessed with earning money and being careful with money that she ends up with a fortune, but has never been away from her business more than a couple of days, has no real friends or family and can she say she really lived in those 30 years in France?

It starts out so humourful and carefree, as we do in youth, assuming great things will come and we have potential, but everything is based on chance. Sophia and Constance are the daughters of a very sucessful draper in the mid 1800s. One of the first scenes is of Sophia, the more spirited of the two, sneakily pulling out one of the assistant draper (Mr Povey)'s teeth - I just love this. Turns out it wasn't the tooth that was causing him pain either. He he. Then the little details such as a circus elephant that gets everyone excited and when it dies, the whole town turns out virtually to cut bits off the corpse as keepsakes.

Constance is happy to work in the family shop and that her future will be there. Sophia needs to break away and aims to go in to teaching (lucky she didn't, as her mentor ends up relying on charity to support her at the end), but then an intense crush on a travelling salesman, Gerald Scales, sees her running off with him. The two sisters then don't see each other or communicate for the next thirty years. Perhaps this it the tragedy. All that lost time, all those years. Their stories are told seperately, first Constance at the shop with her husband, Mr Povey, and son Cyril. Then Sophia who, after being abandoned by her husband, runs a boarding house in France. Both stories feature executions of men who killed their women. It's curious. In both cases no one seems that bothered that the woman's life has been lost - it just seems to get in the way of things. In the English case, it's Mr Povey's cousin who has killed his wife and ends up at the end of a rope. There's a petition to save him, in vain, then after he has died, there is a massive protest march in town referring to his death as a murder. Hang on, didn't this guy KILL his wife?! In France the man killed the woman over jewels as I remember. His execution, by guillotine of course, is a national entertainment event and crowds travel to the town from all over France. Again, somehow farcical.

So much in this book about lives. I loved it. It also makes me a little melancholic and reflective over the nature of living.

An excellent and neglected novel of a merchant class family of Staffordshire.

He saw a fat, old, ridiculous, shapeless woman in a restaurant. Then he imagined her once as a vivacious young girl, perhaps pretty when she was a young woman, had some love affairs, married, brought forth children, and now she's like that, most likely alone and forgotten. For a long while he thought of writing a story about an old woman like her. When he finally got himself into writing it, he thought it would be more challenging to write about two of them, so Arnold Bennett made them sisters--Constance and Sophia Baines.

Life, aging and death. We follow the story of the sisters' two-penny lives (spoiler alert: read on!). They live in a small English provincial town above their father's draper's shop. We see them when they were small girls, grow up to be young women: Constance marrying a local guy (and later inheriting her father's business), while the more spirited Sophia steals money from her aunt and elopes with a playboy traveling businessman to Paris. She remains childless, abandoned by her husband, but by stroke of luck was able to put up a business and prospered. Constance, on the other hand, stays in their town, has a son, sees her loved ones grow old and die one by one (her parents, friends, her husband). Her son leaves to seek his fortune elsewhere.

In old age the sisters are briefly reunited. They shared problems with househelps, their dogs, and Constance's son's apparent neglect of her. Then they, too, die one by one.

You yawn and ask inwardly: why then is this a 5-star? Because this is a masterpiece of realistic writing, Bennett's description of the everyday, humdrum happenings of ordinary 19th century people sucks you inside the book and makes you feel the characters like they're real flesh-and-blood. It's an exciting, unputdownable reading frenzy of non-events. A remarkable example of the old-fashioned way of telling a story, utilizing no attention-getting, sophisticated-sounding modern tricks. Something you'll miss when you get back again to the great, unreadable novels of the current times where you have to pretend understanding them, or deceive yourself into believing that you somehow got the point of your 3-week reading labor, to give them a decent rating.

With one exception, all of Arnold Bennett's fiction was published in the couple of decades following the death of Queen Victoria, yet in tone it is much more Victorian than Edwardian (certainly none of your post-Eliot modernism can be detected at all). In his stated attempt to emulate Flaubert, Zola and other French realists, he has a few startling passages (for example, an attempt to represent the pains of giving birth) that one is hard put to imagine in Elizabeth Gaskell or even the Brontes.
Following two sisters who become separated throughout much of their adult lives, spanning two countries and much of the 19th century, Bennett is credited with being a faithful depicter of the emotional lives of women - in his amusing and informative introduction to my Penguin edition, John Wain comments that it is easy for men to say that but all the women he's asked agree.
The crisis points in 19th century literature are not infrequently hinged on medical afflictions and treatments that seem incredible to the modern eye - "mucous fever" requiring immersion in ice-cold water at 3 hour intervals for days on end is a climactic but somewhat inscrutable point in this one. While not commenting directly on that diagnosis, Bennett has many engaging asides generally on the inexorable march of technological progress and the reaction of each successive generation to these advances.

Masterful character study of two sisters, Constance and Sophia, living in the Midlands town of Bursley in the late 19th and early 20th century. Constance is quiet and dignified, obedient to her mother’s wishes and content to marry the assistant in her father’s drapery business. Sophia is headstrong and determined, and elopes with a smooth talking salesman who later abandons her in Paris.

Bennett is a skilful writer who really pulls the reader in to the lives of these two women and their small social circles. The style is realistic and reminiscent of 19th century greats such as Balzac with the settings in Bursley and Paris being meticulously described. The narrator comments wryly on the characters’ thoughts and motivations, yet everything we are told aligns perfectly with everything we are shown, so that the narrative and characters are totally consistent and convincing.

I would have given this 5* if the third section (Sophia in Paris) hadn’t dragged a wee bit in places, but that is really the only criticism I have of what was a really compelling story.

I almost quit in the middle but am glad I finished. The story was written by a man in 1908. The attitudes and temperaments of the women seem strange and artificial to me but perhaps that was true of these privileged women. The story begins at the time of the US Civil War and ends about 50 years later. Part set in the midlands of England and one section in France, mainly Paris. The theme is youth and age.

According to the preface, Arnold Bennett regularly observed a shapeless old lady with an annoying voice at one of his favorite restaurants and wondered what she was like as a fresh young girl, imagining the details of how her life had progressed to bring her here. Thus begins the inception of The Old Wives' Tale.

The novel follows two English sisters from adolescence to their death beds, including a separation of thirty years with all the highs and lows between. While the more conventional Constance stays in her hometown to carry on the family legacy as a respected member of the trading class, Sophia runs away for love and eventually finds independence abroad. Both women take their turn in the spotlight, and while practical Constance had more of my understanding in the early years, Sophia undoubtedly took center stage for me as the book progressed. Bennett was deliberately interested in the quiet details of life, whether that be in the provincial setting of Bursely or against a much more turbulent backdrop like the Siege of Paris. For me, the Constance portion began to drag, especially as her intolerable son Cyril became more of a principal character. Sophia's rise to a business savvy #girlboss of the Victorian era (a Scarlett O'Hara forerunner if I've ever met one) was more compelling. Her reflections on returning to Bursley three decades later was a highlight for me.

Bennett cleverly includes some subtle parallels in the years the sisters spend apart, offers humor and honesty throughout, and ultimately ushers in the painful poignancy of aging for both women upon their reunion. The more mundane sections tilted toward a 3 star rating, but the overall quality is a solid 4.

“The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young. That he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that.”