Bennett’s very readable telling of the story of Constance and Sophia, two sisters, from young adulthood to old age and death. Bennett shows wonderfully how even ordinary lives — like Constance’s or even Sophia’s (which was certainly more exciting than her sister’s and full of heartbreak and struggle) are full and rich with experiences, they have their little and large tussles, joys, loss and sadness, and even some drama. He also shows that perhaps one can’t label or characterise anything — whether a life, a person, an event, or a situation quite so simply; for instance people can at once be ridiculous and tragic like Madame Foucault as can situations like Mr Baines’ death which is somewhat ridiculous, tragic, and grotesque all at the same time, and that life’s little jokes aren’t all that pleasant for the person it plays them on. I liked how the story comes full circle with Sophia and Constance ending up coming together living like Mrs Baines and Aunt Harriet years ago when they were starting their adult lives, while the next generation (Dick and Lily and the callous Cyril) set off on or rather continue their own journeys.

Surprised to find myself hooked on this soap opera from back in the day.

Bennett writes like a journalist. He is at his best when relating events, and pretty good in descriptions of settings. For me, his characters are wooden, plunked down in the setting. Dramatic progression is achieved by introducing or bringing back minor characters in a haphazard way. Female characters are unreal because they are objects--described from a distance, othered. The male characters are more real, but the most real for me are the dogs. Whenever they are in a scene, it comes to life.

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
10 out of 10 – “by far the finest long novel written in English and in the English fashion".
Ranked 332nd on The Greatest Books of All Time list


The Old Wives’ Tale is the ultimate, archetypal, splendid, memorable, amusing, profound, disturbing and so rewarding, outstanding chef d’oeuvre, included on two of the most relevant lists compiled by The Modern Library and The Guardian:

The former is The 100 Best Novels list that you can find here: http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/...
While the latter is The Guardian 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list - https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

This stupendous masterpiece describes the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Banes, born in Burslem, Britain, with rather different personalities, the former being more conservative, restrained, while the latter would prove to be more impetuous, somewhat reckless, a t least in the first part of her life.
Their father is very sick, has lived in his bed for a long while, while the shop they own is supervised by their mother and a rigid, stubborn Mr. Povey, very attracted to Constance, who is not insensitive to this feeling.

An incident takes place in the small town, when a poor elephant is shot and the population gathers to see the cadaver, take mementos from the carcass and while her mother and sister are attending the spectacle, Sophia is so distracted by the presence of a young, dashing salesman, Gerald, who is on occasion discussing business in the family shop.
Sophia was supposed to watch over the immobilized father, but because of the agitation caused by Gerald Scales, she does not attend to the patient for some minutes and the sick man dies and the young woman is accused by a neighbor of being the cause of the tragedy.

It could be argued that the incident might have been for the better, for the man was in a condition that would make one consider euthanasia in this day and age, when someone is so sick as to be reduced to the state of a vegetable, without possessing any control over his movements, speech, his life ultimately.
Young Gerald Scales manages to seduce the innocent, but impetuous Sophia, who walks incognito to meet the salesman and then responds to his proposition, eloping with him to London in the first place, where she insists that they need to be married, even if he seems to have no intention to do so, in spite of the fact that this is exactly what he had said in order to get the girl to run with him.

The couple would eventually get married, travel to Paris, where the once charming, dedicated, enthusiastic young man starts losing his merits, luster and shows very ugly traits of character, first a habit of living much beyond his means – so much so that he would become eventually bankrupt and later on destitute – and then he would show his true colors, proving to be a loathsome, unfaithful, disloyal, abusive, shallow, evil husband.
Days after they had married, he insists on travelling with a friend, Chirac, to Auxerre, where a public execution takes place, hence everything in the town is immensely expensive, for men and women have travelled far to attend what they see as an interesting, exciting performance, which would occasion Gerald to ignore, abandon his wife for the company of a prostitute.

The scene of the execution is gruesome, detailed with mastery by the brilliant Arnold Bennett, before and following it, the proud Sophia understands what a grave mistake she has committed in marrying this scoundrel, with whom she spends nevertheless another four years, then Gerald is acutely short of money – spending lavishingly though on his pleasures, cigars and trifles –and blackmails his wife into asking her family for funds, or else they starve.
The rascal leaves her, but not before asking for a loan from Chirac, money that the poor wife would have trouble to repay, for the fugitive would not return and the life of Sophia takes another turn, after struggle and impressive effort, she uses a talent that might have been in the genes of a family of shop owners and becomes quite rich and rather famous as the owner of a large establishment in Paris.

Meanwhile, her sister has married Samuel Povey, they have had a son, Cyril, prospered in the management of the shop, but a tragedy that takes place in the town, involving a cousin who kills his alcoholic wife, then gets sent to prison and sentenced to hang takes a toll on Samuel, who is involved all the way in the effort of trying to get a pardon for the relative.
After Samuel Povey dies, a friend of Cyril is vising the pension owned and managed by Sophia Scales and recognizes the astonishing resemblance between the woman and his friend, understanding from this and the information he has received that this is the once impulsive girl who has run away, sending only some post cards later to inform her family that she is well.

Once back in England, he first informs his comrade and then Constance, who writes to her long departed sister to invite her to Burslem, where the two reunite and live happily for a while – well, this statement should be revised, for in spite of the fact that the two Old Wives find so much to enjoy in the company of each other, Constance is somehow under strain, tense and upset by the need to change so many of her habits when her more imperious, imposing sibling arrives.
This phenomenal, glorious, extraordinary, ecstatic masterpiece has its copyright expired and therefore you can find the eBook on the Gutenberg site or even an excellent audiobook version, which is tremendous, at https://librivox.org/.

H.G. Wells described The Old Wives' Tale as "by far the finest long novel written in English and in the English fashion".

This book has a simple plot. What makes it great are the insights into human nature. Every age of the sisters is very well done, truly giving the reader insight into people at every age. Also, the descriptions of day to day activities of people of the past is very enjoyable. They pull you right into another time! Sometimes I had to look things up, like when the child was fighting a " Boneshaker". I found out that was the wooden precursor of the Pennyfarthing which eventually led to the bicycle. Once I knew what the Boneshaker was, the passage made complete sense and I was transported to the 1800's watching this child as he learned to ride.
The story of two sisters and how their lives turn out is very simple but we care so much about the characters that the book is hard to put down. Interlaced throughout the book is the slow change of the world. By the time the sisters are old, there are even motorcars driving about. What struck me the deepest was the description of small town mentality. The author completely nails it, in a very nonjudgmental way, even going into people's minds so the reader can understand the small town mentality from the source. This is an amazing work and I'm surprised it isn't better known.

This is the epitome of understated brilliance. An utterly absorbing book: well-written, funny, vivid, and astute. If it was written by a woman, it would likely be deemed a feminist classic, not because it contains any comment on gender politics, but rather because it is almost entirely concerned with female experience and because it assumes the full humanity of women in a way still rare in books published by many male authors 50 (60, 70, 80 . . . ) years later.

I really liked the structure of this book as it followed the lives of two sisters from teenagehood to the end of their lives. The premise that there is a young girl living inside every "stout middle-aged woman" is lovely, as I'm at that middle age mark now. The book did seem to peter out a bit at the end, but then so did their lives.

A touching novel covering the lives of the two Baines sisters over a span of more than four decades beginning in the 1860s. As their lives diverged early in the story, Bennett creates two parallel narratives realistically mingling happiness and sadness, enlivened throughout by the narrator’s dry sense of humor in describing that “that is what life is”.

Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale is a good, but not great, novel about the lives led by two women from a small town in England. While he writes with both a high degree of realism and historical accuracy there are moments, especially in the opening chapters, that test the reader's patience. His devotion to the quotidian details of everyday life does not always rise to the level of interest, even when presented well by a master prose stylist. Our Lincoln Park Book Group discussed this novel this evening and concluded that Bennett succeeded in his attempt at realism and that the characters, particularly the two sisters, Sophia and Constance, had depth and believability.

Bennett's ability to successfully develop believable female characters with the protagonists is one of the best aspects of this novel. His realistic style compares favorably with William Dean Howells whose novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, also demonstrates a sensitive portrayal of women. I found that the novel became more interesting as each of the four sections unfolded, ultimately becoming a satisfying portrayal of small town life during the end of the Victorian era.

A simple concept of parallels and contrasts in the lives of sisters, carefully told with gentle irony. It starts in 1864 when Constance and Sophia are 16 and 15 respectively and follows them to the end of their lives.

Book 1 covers their teenage years together above and in a draper’s shop in a small town in the Staffordshire Potteries (central England). Book 2 is in the same location, but focuses on Constance. Book 3 is set in Paris during great political upheaval and war, and is about Sophia. In book 4, the two threads come together again.

Bennett modelled it on the great realistic French novels of the time (Balzac, Flaubert et al); in some ways it is very mundane, and yet the attention to detail is extraordinary and compelling. As an elderly Sophia muses,
“My life has been so queer – and yet every part of it separately seemed ordinary enough.”


Image: French café scene by Jean Béraud.

Contrasts

It opens with a description of the bucolic countryside, observing “But though Constance and Sophia were in it they were not of it” because “no person who lives in the district… ever thinks about the county”, even though it’s so much pleasanter than the busy, dirty town.

They are the only children of a bedridden but successful and respected draper whose hatred of “puffing” meant he refused to replace the fallen shop sign lest he “condone, yea, to participate in, the modern craze for unscrupulous self-advertisement”. The draper’s shop and home is their world, and yet their lives end up taking very different paths.

Sometimes the contrasts are more parallel than they first seem, and I think this is an aspect that bears further thought and eventual rereading. Constance spends her whole life in the town, living a traditional life as dutiful daughter, wife, mother and widow, whereas Sophia spends many years in France, surviving the Siege of Paris and building independent success.

Their lives seem so different, and for Sophia, there is an aspect of missing England when she’s in France and vice versa. However, despite the apparent exoticism of her life, she comes to realise that her “life, in its way, had been as narrow as Constance’s. Though her experience of humanity was wide… she had been utterly absorbed in doing one single thing.”

I think the only weak point was some aspects of the ending, but in such a long and wonderful book, it's only a minor issue.

Sisterhood

The sisters are deliberately treated equally by their parents: their workboxes “were different but one was not more magnificent than the other. Indeed, a rigid equality was the rule” and yet “in some subtle way, Constance had a standing with her parents which was more confidential than Sofia’s”. This is clear when Mrs Baines confides in Constance about her problems with Sophia: “her tone was peculiar, charged with import, confidential, and therefore very flattering to Constance.”

They are close, though they have very different temperaments, with Sophia being the more mischievous and “a prey ripe for the evil one”. She is clever, proud, shrewd with money, independent and obstinate; she would rather suffer than beg or ask for forgiveness. Constance is… suited to her name, like the continuity and familiarity in her life. She is more dutiful and happy to assume she will go into the shop, but Sophia “had always hated the shop. She did not understand how her mother and Constance could bring themselves to be deferential and flattering to every customer that entered”.

Their teenage banter, mild naughtiness (trying on mother’s new dress), and sneering at a servant from afar could easily be transplanted to teenage sisters anywhere or when. Curiously, their adult relationship seems more like something from a historical novel than their childhood one.

Is Blindness the Price of Love?

A recurring theme is the wilful blindness of love, be that of a parent, spouse or even another relative. All the main characters suffer for it in different ways, though one finally acknowledges the truth to herself, if not to others, and “her affection was unimpaired”. For a more extreme analysis of this idea, that I rated only 2*, see Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, which I reviewed HERE.

Can a child of less than five be bad? Is it “hidden sullenness or mere callous indifference, or a perfect unconsciousness of sin?” And is it misguided to say “If we can be happy only when I give way to him, I must give way to him”? However, that is hard to maintain:
“She lived for nothing but to please him; he was, however, exceedingly difficult to please, not in the least because he was hypocritical and exacting, but because he was indifferent… whereas he was the whole of her universe, she was merely a dim figure in the background of his.”

Modernity and Feminine Insight?

The book has a curiously modern feeling in some ways. In particular, Sophia’s teenage rebellion doesn’t feel like something from a Victorian novel (though this was written in Edwardian times), either in terms of what she says, or what she does. When defiant, she is sullen and evasive, exhibits a “diffident boldness”, plays the fairness card (“Oh, of course Constance is always right”), answers back with excessive logic (“You tell me not to answer back, and then you say you’re waiting”) and declares “You all want to make me miserable… Put me in prison if you like! I know you’d be glad if I was dead!”. One confrontation ends when, “with a brusque precipitation of herself, vanished upstairs”. I’m sure most modern readers have been involved in such conversations.

Although written by a man, all the main characters are women, but they are convincingly and insightfully rendered. For example, Constance’s feelings after her honeymoon are delicately but touchingly described:
“She sat there full of new knowledge and new importance, brimming with experience and strange, unexpected aspirations, purposes, yes - and cunnings!...You could see the timid thing [old, virginal Constance] peeping wistfully out of the eyes of the married woman.”

And the all-encompassing love of a new mother for her baby, she “dived into the recesses of the perambulator and extricated from its cocoon the centre of the universe, and scrutinised him with quiet passion.” The awkwardness of breastfeeding in front of others, and the stresses of controlled crying (not that it’s called that) are also discussed.

At a more trivial level, problems with builders promises, timescales and workmanship are timeless, and the etiquette of all-you-can-eat fare troubled even Edwardians, apparently: the delicate dilemma of “fixed price per day for as much as they can consume while observing the rules of the game… in an instant decided how much they could decently take, and to what extent they could practise the theoretical liberty of choice… they had the right to seize all that was present under their noses, like genteel tigers; and they had the right to refuse; that was all.”

(In contrast, it is very Victorian in the way that women can be laid low by severe shock or a bit of a chill.)

Sympathy

In the Preface, Bennett says “it is an absolute rule that the principal characters of a novel must not be unsympathetic”. I don’t necessarily agree, but he stuck to his principle in this, and the others of his that I have read, which is not to say that his characters are flat or saccharine. And he has no such qualms where some of the minor male characters are concerned.

Quotes
•t“It is to be remembered that in those days Providence was still busying himself [yes, him] with everybody’s affairs.”
•tThe wakes (regional festival) were “an orgiastic carnival, gross in all its manifestations of joy. The whole centre of the town was given over to the furious pleasures of the people… displaying all the delights of the horrible.”
•t“She was athirst for sympathy in the task of scorning everything local.”
•tTypical Bennett: “One of Maggie’s deepest instincts, always held in check by the dominance of Mrs Baines, was to leave pails prominent on the main routes of the house: and now, divining what was at hand, it flamed into insurrection.”
•tDr Harrop was “common sense in breeches”.
•tWhen Mr Scales mentioned his fox-terrier bitch, he “had no suspicion that he was transgressing a convention by virtue of which dogs have no sex” (and I wonder if any Edwardian readers would have balked at Bennett’s use of the word “sex”).
•tBe careful what may be overheard by servants, “A clumsy question might enlighten a member of the class which ought ever be enlightened about one’s private affairs”.
•t“The era of good old-fashioned Christmases, so agreeably picturesque for the poor, was not yet at an end.”
•t “The remarkable notion that twelve thousand pounds represents the infinity of wealth, that this sum possessed special magical properties which rendered it insensible to the process of subtraction.”
•t“Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire.”
•t“The irrational obstinacy of a physically weak man who sticks to it that he can defy the laws of nature.”
•tBennett loves writing about hotels, and says “critically examining newcomers was one of the amusements of the occupants of the lounge.”
•t“The patched and senile drabness of the [hotel] bedroom.”
•tYou can tell respectable hotel guests because “their clothes… did not flatter the lust of the eye”.
•t“The respectability of a luxury private hotel makes proper every act that passes within its walls.”


Modern British Asian Retelling!
Hugely disappointing, and I suggest avoiding it. My review is here: Marriage Material

Please, tell me how the author’s preface to this edition is laugh-out-loud funny but the actual book so far is full of things like this: “They pressed their noses against the windows of the showroom, and gazed down into the Square as perpendicularly as the projecting front of the shop would allow. The show-room was over the millinery and silken half of the shop. Over the woollen and shirting half were the drawing room and the chief bedroom” and it just continues from there.

To be totally fair to him the author writes in the preface that he calculated the book would be 200k words “and I had a vague notion that no novel of such dimensions (except Richardson’s) had ever been written before. So I counted the words in several famous Victorian novels and discovered to my relief that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words apiece.” (He then goes on to talk about how much he “hated, and still hate[s], the awful business of research” and tells a funny anecdote about how little research he did for this book.)

Anyway can you feel the irony of my turning away from ao3 to seek out books where the filler has been sufficiently edited out, only to check out *this* guy’s book from the library…. Maybe I’ll try a shorter book by him instead, if one exists lol.

One fun thing is that my library apparently got out of storage and lent to me the 1931 (?!) edition of this book, which has a note at the beginning that says that at my request the publishers will send me an illustrated folder about their Modern Library series - “Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price.” So that’s fun!

Anyway I’m DNFing this on page 8.

Wow, that opening... what a lot of words. Surely one of the densest, wordiest opening chapters of all time?

Bennett begins as he means to continue, with verbiage unceasingly flowing from his pen. Once he gets passed the laborious 'setting the scene' rigamarole, however, the literary excesses becomes less odious, almost as though the author is settling into his stride.

The two sisters at the heart of this novel, Constance and Sophia, are not the most psychologically complex characters ever written. Then again, I don't think they're meant to be complicated people; rather, they are two ordinary women who fall into their lives almost by accident. Even when they seem to be making proactive decisions, their proactivity is undermined by the nature of the world and people around them. Everything flows inexorably forward, and one of the best things about this novel is that the plot doesn't feel mechanical, but seems to progress naturally, perhaps fatalistically, to its conclusion.