This was my first experience with Arnold Bennett’s fiction; I’d previously read his Literary Taste. (He is not to be confused, as I’ve done in the past, with novelist and playwright Alan Bennett (An Uncommon Reader, etc.)!) Bennett (1867–1931) was from the Potteries region of Staffordshire and moved to London in his early twenties to work in a law office. Anna of the Five Towns (1902) was his second novel and first moderate success, but it was The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy (1910–16) that truly made his name.

Bennett was a contemporary of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy (though Hardy had given up on novels by that point), and Anna reminds me of each of these authors to an extent – but particularly of Lawrence, what with his working-class Midlands roots. I also frequently thought of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (religious angst) and Far from the Madding Crowd (a heroine who faces romantic entanglements and financial responsibility for the first time).

Twenty-year-old Anna Tellwright is a Methodist Sunday school teacher and lives with her twelve-year-old sister, Agnes, and their ill-tempered father, Ephraim, in “Bursley” (Bennett’s name for Burslem, now part of Stoke-on-Trent). The family is well off thanks to Ephraim’s canny property investments and inheritances he and his late wife received. Yet Anna is still dumbfounded to learn, on her twenty-first birthday, that she’s worth £50,000. Ephraim, generally referred to as “the miser” – there’s no nuance here; he’s typecast and never rises above the label – is happy to turn over certain aspects of the business to Anna, like hounding their tenants the Prices for late rent, but doesn’t give her autonomy over her daily spending. She must meekly approach her father each time she wants to purchase something for herself.

Anna has a suitor, Henry Mynors, whose business Ephraim supports as a sleeping partner. She loves the idea of being loved – and the suspicion that she has unwittingly wrenched a desirable prospect away from pretty Beatrice Sutton. But she doesn’t seem to be truly in love with Henry, just like her heart isn’t fully committed to the local revival put on by the Methodists. After all, she hasn’t had the emotional conversion experience that would prove irrefutably that she is saved. Much as she beats herself up over her so-called sins, the desired transformation never arrives. Instead, the closest thing she has to an epiphany comes when she’s standing atop a hill on the Isle of Man on her first-ever holiday:

She perceived that the monotony, the austerity, the melancholy of her existence had been sweet and beautiful of its kind, and she recalled, with a sort of rapture, hours of companionship with the beloved Agnes, when her father was equable and pacific. Nothing was ugly nor mean. Beauty was everywhere, in everything.

The Prices take on unforeseen significance in the novel, and in her dealings with them Anna is caught between a wish to be Christlike in her compassion and the drive to act as the shrewd businesswoman her father expects. Though she is eventually able to wrest back something like financial independence, she remains bound by the social convention of marrying well.

Anna is more timid and introspective than your average heroine; I felt great sympathy for her not in spite of but because of those character traits. I recently took the Myers-Briggs test for the first time, and wondered if Anna could be an ISTJ like me – she dreads having to visit her pupils’ homes and make small talk with the parents, comes across as curt when nervous, and can’t seem to turn her brain off and just feel instead.

There’s a lack of subtlety to Bennett’s writing, something I particularly noted in the physical descriptions (“She was tall, but not unusually so, and sturdily built up. Her figure, though the bust was a little flat, had the lenient curves of absolute maturity”) and some heavy-handed foreshadowing (“It was on the very night after this eager announcement that the approaching tragedy came one step nearer”). But I can let him off considering that this was published 115 years ago. It’s an excellent example of regional literature (can you think of another book set in Staffordshire?), with Anna’s visit to Henry’s pottery works a particular highlight. Bennett takes an unpromising setting and rather humble people and becomes their bard:

Nothing could be more prosaic than the huddled, red-brown streets; nothing more seemingly remote from romance. Yet be it said that romance is even here—

Several miles away, the blast-furnaces of Cauldron Bar Ironworks shot up vast wreaths of yellow flame with canopies of tinted smoke. Still more distant were a thousand other lights crowning chimney and kiln, and nearer, on the waste lands west of Bleakridge, long fields of burning ironstone glowed with all the strange colours of decadence. The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.

The tea, made specially magnificent in honour of the betrothal, was such a meal as could only have been compassed in Staffordshire or Yorkshire—a high tea of the last richness and excellence, exquisitely gracious to the palate, but ruthless in its demands on the stomach. At one end of the table … was a fowl which had been boiled for four hours; at the other, a hot pork-pie, islanded in liquor, which might have satisfied a regiment. Between these two dishes were … hot pikelets, hot crumpets, hot toast, sardines with tomatoes, raisin-bread, currant-bread, seed-cake, lettuce, home-made marmalade and home-made jams. The repast occupied over an hour, and even then not a quarter of the food was consumed.

I enjoyed this for the pacey plot, the religious theme, the sympathetic protagonist, and the loving look at an industrial area. I’ll certainly be looking out for copies of Bennett’s other novels in secondhand bookshops; meanwhile, Project Gutenberg also has a good selection of his writings.

Originally published with images on my blog, Bookish Beck.

Un romanzo di cui non avevo mai sentito parlare. Un romanzo strano. I primi tre quarti sono decisamente vittoriani ma, pur leggendosi facilmente, sono carichi di tensione: non succede nulla di eclatante, ma si percepisce che QUALCOSA sta per accadere. E poi "boom", eccolo lì il colpo di scena, che mi ha pure lasciato gli occhi lucidi. E la storia, nell'ultimo quarto del libro, scorre... scorre fino a un altro "mega boom" finale!

Anna Tellwright is a woman of great integrity. She lives with her miserly father and young sister Agnes in the Staffordshire Potteries. On coming of age, Anna receives her inheritance, but her father continues to control the money. With this largely unobtainable money, comes responsibility too. Anna finds herself torn between loyalty to her father and compassion towards her newly-acquired tenants. In amongst this turmoil appears the handsome and successful Henry Mynors. He has his eyes determinedly fixed on Anna. She has some decisions to make. Will she marry Mynors? What will she do with her non-paying tenants and how can she appease her unreasonable father?
tArnold Bennett is great at portraying convincing, likeable women characters and Anna is no exception. But he’s also really good at depicting provincial Victorian life too and this coupled with Anna’s story makes for a really enjoyable read.

This book was a gem and a possibility to travel back in time some 120 years or so. The start was a bit slow, and it took me a while to grow into the characters. The main ones were Anna and her little half-sister Agnes, their father, Anna's fiancé Henry and father and son Price, who were constantly in debt to Anna's family.

The novel spins around the theme of money and what it can and cannot achieve. After the first somewhat slow pages it is revealed to Anna that she has inherited quite a sum of money from her mother, and gets hold of it when turning 21. However, she is unable to use it or enjoy the situation, having always lived under the silent tyranny of her father. She get's engaged, and it is hinted that maybe the fiancé was prompted by the inheritance. She suffers from the fact that her father demands her to squeeze the last penny from the Prices.

The tensions in the book grow between the lines, and there are very subtle nuances to promote them in the text. Her father's tyranny, Henry's true motives, Agnes' dependence on Anna, Anna's anxiety over Prices - nothing is ever loudly expressed, but nevertheless the reader gets uneasy as the events roll on. And so much is laden in the last two pages which are the richest in emotions and reveal the magnitude of the tragedy of these lives presented.

A truly fascinating piece of literature, made only more interesting when comparing it to the possibilities and limitations of women in the 21st century.

A mini classic, well drawn characters, real life issues, no caricatures, paints a picture of time and place. Cracking.

Arnold Bennet's Anna of The Five Towns is a short novel, set in the Five Towns, as he calls the Staffordshire pottery towns. I think Bennet like so many of the novelists of the late 19th century-early 20th century, including Stevenson, Gissing, Meredith, etc are hardly at the focus of literary discourse presently. Bennet belongs to a cohort of writers, whose novels seem to have got a reputation as genteel, sedate, and harmless, compared with the rampant experimentalism of what was to follow later in the 20th century. None the less his novels reward the reader with their robust construction and finely balanced aesthetic. I think Five Town's is a good example that works of Bennet and his peers have sufficiently enduring qualities, in its keen study of people, in its tactile realism, to enthrall modern readers.

The core tension is of the main character Anna Tellwright having to deal with her tyrannical, parsimonious father while navigating the strict moral framework of a tight-knit small-town Methodist community. The tiny, almost imperceptible cues of people's behavior and mannerisms are noticed and expressed by Bennet. The talk of Mynors, a seeming suitor of Ms. Tellwright is described as "Easy inflections of a man well accustomed to prominence in the society of woman". Anna assists with teaching Sunday school, and is forced to do some door to door missionary visitations, for which she has no aptitude, he says "She had no talent for such work, which demands the vocal rather than the meditative temperament". These fragments, in isolation, lose some of their power but embedded in the narration, they provide a rich texture.

Another interesting perspective is that of Mr. Tellwright, Anne's father, whose pursues the preservation and multiplication of finances, with a monk-like zeal. Money seems to flow to him from all parts of the world, in the form of dividends in diverse investments. His ways are of the prudent rich. He runs his family with a frugal economy. On one occasion, Anna is astonished to learn that another wealthy family regularly spent money on frivolous expenses, which in a week's time would have surpassed her household expenses for a year. There is even a scene when Anna, from one of the richest families in town, as a fully grown adult, tastes chocolate for the first time in her life; Her father was diligent in providing only the barest of necessities to his household. He is stern in pursuing his debtors, and do not let feelings of mercy or friendship interfere. Ultimately, his uncompromising attitude is what precipitates the tragic events that close the story.

Despite a cloistered upbringing, how Anne blooms into a woman of agency, is also something that Bennet has piquantly portrayed. She was timid and self-conscious in her early interactions and we see her grow more assured of herself, on what to say and do. The development of her relationship with Mynors, the upright, industrious young man, while in the Isle of Man, is a realistic likeness of how young men and women get enamored with each other gently, by degrees. Eventually, we see Anne, wised up enough to know what things to renounce in life, and what to accept, leading to a remarkable ending.

The pottery industry of the Five Towns plays a huge role in the background. The smokestacks dominate the vista, the air hangs heavy with the smoke of clay ovens. It seems to determinate the character of the people, that which they have been doing for centuries virtually unchanged, despite the advent of modern mechanical improvements. The primeval skill of fashioning things of utility and value out of mud is something that will endure till the end of times, thinks Bennet.

"Man hardened clay into a bowl before he spun flax and made a garment, and the last lone man will want an earthen vessel after he has abandoned his ruined house for a cave, and his woven rags for an animal skin. This supremacy of the most ancient of crafts is in the secret nature of things, and cannot be explained".


His descriptions are very painterly, the shapes, shades and hues, tint and light are all often clearly discernible. There is a certain pleasing romanticism to his passages like this one:

"Presently they had surmounted the limit of habitation and were on the naked flank of Bradda, following a narrow track which crept upwards amid short mossy turf of the most vivid green. Nothing seemed to flourish on this exposed height except bracken, sheep, and boulders that, from a distance, resembled sheep; there was no tree, scarcely a shrub; the immense contours, stark, grim, and unrelieved, rose in melancholy and defiant majesty against the sky; the hand of man could coax no harvest from these smooth but obdurate slopes; they had never relented, and they would never relent. The spirit was braced by the thought that here, to the furtherest eternity of civilization more and more intricate, simple and strong souls would always find solace and repose."

Another place he describes a dresser, a piece of venerable furniture, which while it aged, had acquired a character. Decades of use and care have polished it, gave it a certain richness of texture, beyond what a newly minted piece can have.

"Seventy years of continuous polishing by a dynasty of priestesses of cleanliness has given to this dresser a rich ripe tone which the cleverest trade-trickster could not have imitated. In it was reflected the conscientious labour of generations. It had a soft and assuaged appearance, as though it had never been new and could never have been new."


An educative and engaging read. For such a short novel of fewer than 200 pages, it covers a lot of ground. A good introduction to Bennet, I think, after having read this and "The Card", I am eager to read more of him.

re-read via BBC4 dramatisation starting Sunday 6th March

I picked up this book in a used bookstore in Preston, England, knowing nothing about Bennett. And while I enjoyed the writing and particularly some of the family portraits he lays out, the crux of the book -- Anna's relationships with men -- doesn't quite work for me (don't worry, no spoiler alert needed).

Anna lives in one of the "Five Towns" near Liverpool renowned for their pottery making and coal mining, and Bennett does not spare the cityscapes from caustic descriptions. Her father is a miser and a tyrant, having outlived both his daughters' mothers and now making his money through real estate and investments. If dinner is not served precisely, an explosion and a night of shunning ensues.

Anna learns from him that she is coming into an inheritance that makes her a wealthy woman, yet she must still beg him for shopping money (until a fateful act of rebellion late in the story). Meanwhile, she is being pursued in an oh so decorous fashion by one of the most eligible bachelors and up and coming entrepreneurs in the city.

Anna's particular cross to bear, though, even more than the gossips of the Methodist church society, is that one of her inheritances is a disheveled piece of property owned by the Sunday School superintendent, a lugubrious and hypocritically moralistic man who is always behind on the rent, and whose shambling, awkward son is often sent down to deliver what payments he can.

This becomes the basis for what will pass for a crisis at the conclusion of this book, and I leave it to you to decide whether Bennett makes that work. For me, the careful development of his characters and descriptions never built up a solid foundation for the dramatic ending, so I couldn't end up giving this raves, even though I think the portrait of Anna's father is one of the most disgustingly compelling ones around.

Excellent. Arnold Bennett has such a wonderful way of capturing the way people think and speak - or rather as they thought and spoke 100 years ago.

I used to live in the Stoke on Trent area and am at home with the dialect words and phrases. Also with the area. Arnold Bennett uses slightly fictionalised names for the towns (Bursley instead of Burslem, for instance) and streets (Trafalgar Street instead of Waterloo Road) so anybody familiar with the area knows exactly where his characters live, where they tread.

During my recent walk from SW France to NW England (Vic's Big Walk, followed by the book of the same name)I walked the length of Trafalgar/Waterloo and also had a nostalgic mosey around Bursley/Burslem.

Anna of the Five Towns is an enjoyable and informative read and also helped me to continue last year's experience.

Ah, literary realism, how thou mildly interests me.

Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns is a painfully middle-class English novel, with all that entails. What’s that, I hear you ask — and I’m all too happy to provide as long-winded an explanation as some of the descriptions within the novel. Before that, however, I feel the need to point out one fact:
Despite this novel seeking to present the perfectly ordinary everyday happenings of a small Victorian community, I wasn’t bored. I read it mainly in two sittings for my university course, Researching Literature, and I. Was. Not. Bored.

I enjoyed, as always, the view of Victorian society, the break-down between the social classes (as always, never shown but always hinted at). It’s all very prim and proper until you get to the English Potteries where the genteel mask of our middle-class characters slips away with such remarkable ease. Except, of course, for Ephram Tellwright, father of the eponymous Anna. Ephram is one of those interesting literary characters, easy to despise but also remarkable for the fact that they hold onto no pretenses of their own nature. Ephram’s nature is ugly – devilishly ugly…but he is honest about it, at least.

Now, then. What’re the major issues I take with this novel?

Anna’s meekness: here is a character so perfectly, painfully innocent that you can’t help feeling that she’s a cardboard cutout on which Bennett projects his vision of womanhood. It fits so well, my theory! Anna is the model of the Victorian woman, a dutiful mistress of the household who lives and dies by the responsibilities resting on her shoulders.

The way Willy Price is presented: Oh look at the poor people, they’re so meek and unfortunate! Yeah, no. That’s something I take issue with. Someone in Willy’s position wouldn’t be this accepting and timid – they’d be angry, they’d be pissed!

Really, it all boils down to the overuse of stereotypes. Bennett can’t step outside his I can’t blame him for this – it’s a marking of the time he lived and wrote in. But it makes the ‘realism’ label suspect.

And can I take a minute to disect the blurb on Goodreads for a minute? Listen ‘ere:

Anna, a woman of reserve and integrity, lives with her tyrannical and selfish father. Courted for her money by the handsome and successful Henry Mynors, Anna defies her father’s wrath–with tragic results. Set in the Potteries against a background of dour Wesleyan Methodism, Anna of the Five Towns is a brilliantly perceptive novel of provincial life in Victorian England.

Time and again, we readers are told by Bennett that Mynors is courting Anna because he truly loves her and money doesn’t even come into his considerations — there’s a scene, about 90% into the book, in which money enters into Henry’s considerations, in fact, and it’s very obvious how it affects him.

And “Anna defies her father’s wrath – with tragic results.” What?! Who wrote this?! She defies her father, aye, true enough – but only after tragedy has striken. And “defies her father’s wrath” isn’t correct, either; it’s her defying his will that causes old Ephram’s wrath – but the man is a sexist tyrant and a miser, everything causes his wrath!

Whoever wrote this blurb needs to be severely mocked, is my pronouncement. As for the book? Three stars, thank you very much. Maybe slightly less? 2.95/5? 2.75? Ah, well.

It’s an okay read – and if you’re in love with Victorian England and its middle class, you will just LOVE this. My professional interest in this novels extends no further than…mild enjoyment, however.

Make of that what you will.

Tenía la intención de empezar a leer este libro poco a poco, sin devorarlo, tomándomelo con calma y disfrutando de la preciosa edición a la que nos tiene acostumbrados la editorial .
Pero.... No ha podido ser.
Ha sido empezarlo y no querer dejarlo. Os voy a decir los motivos :

La ambientación. Bursley, una de las cinco poblaciones que forman las Cinco Villas, famosas por la porcelana y la industria alfarera en torno a la que gira la vida de la zona. Describe maravillosamente la zona, las alfarerías de la ciudad, la sociedad de la época, la vida diaria, la familia, el trabajo, la educación de los niños o la religión de sus habitantes. Y también el comportamiento de las personas que era diferente según su posición social.


La historia. Anna Tellwright es una joven sencilla, que lleva una vida sencilla con su tiránico padre Ephraim y su media hermana menor Agnes. Cumple con sus deberes sin quejarse, sin expectativas ni grandes esperanzas en nada.
Cuando llega a la mayoría de edad , su padre le anuncia que ha recibido una gran herencia que le dejó su madre fallecida, lo que la convierte en una mujer rica. Pero eso no cambia nada ya que sigue dependiendo de su avaro padre.
Anna consiente todas sus imposiciones pero.... Empieza a tener relaciones sociales y empieza a tomar decisiones.


Los personajes. Anna, personaje femenino que representa la vida de una mujer joven acorralada por la iglesia, su padre tiránico y lo que la sociedad esperaba de una mujer joven con muy poca libertad para seguir su propio camino hacia la felicidad.
Henry Mynors, el soltero más codiciado de la zona, empresario y pretendiente de Anna.
Titus y Willie Price, inquilinos de Anna, pobres y endeudados y que tienen un papel muy importante. Los Sutton, Agnes... Todos representativos de los distintos estamentos sociales de la época.


Como lo cuenta . De una forma sencilla, detallista, pausada pero con un tono crítico. El costumbrismo que tanto me gusta, el espacio que dedica a las gentes, la descripción de las mujeres que desafiaban lo establecido... El hecho de que parece que no pasa nada pero todo pasa sobre todo las emociones y los sentimientos. Y el final.... Un final que espero que me comentéis que os ha parecido porque teneis que leerlo.


En conclusión, una lectura maravilosa que he disfrutado muchísimo y que recomiendo enormemente. Una auténtica delicia.