I dedicate this book to the phrase - don't judge a book by its cover - especially the blurb you read on that cover.
I liked this book, I hated this book, it was slow and predictable, it had such unexpected surprises.
Having read the blurb, I was primed not to like this book. It runs at a slow pace where every thought running through Anna's mind is known. I found it hard to read whenever her father shows up, such an unsympathetic character with no real reason known why he is they way he is.
It was good to read a book about the every day characters, sad to read a book about how their lives were run by their bosses with nary a say in almost aspect of their lives.
Particularly sad is the story of a housekeeper who lives for those she cooks and cleans for and is happy when her life comes to an end and she has managed to save up just enough for her own funeral.
Anna herself is a little unsympathetic, but good to see her finally coming out of her shell and having her own little rebellion against her miserly father.
On the whole not the most entertaining book you will ever read, but interesting none the less.
I would recommend this book to those you want to see the other side of life around the 1900's, not just the lives of the landed gentry.

I loved this book. It had everything, men, moods and money and maybe murder, very melodramatic. What more do you want in a Victorian potboiler? It would make a wonderful Hollywood movie Plenty of opportunity for some thin, big-eyed, dark-haired beauty to lean out of a window and emote, panting fetchingly as her bosom heaves up and down and her eyes fill with glycerine tears.

This isn't a plot-based novel, but one that is full of detail and seems to be a realistic depiction of life for a young woman hemmed in by church, her tyrannical father, and what society expected from a young woman of means which allowed her very little freedom to follow her own path to happiness.

This isn't the upper class of Virginia Woolf and their despising of people "in trade", this is the Victorian England of the middle class where the Protestant ethic of hard work is key to the exploitation of the lower classes in the pursuit of money. The financial industry, banks and investment opportunities are now all respectable and no longer need to be thought of with disgust by Christians, who had previously banned it for themselves but allowed Jews to do it and called them, "money lenders".

If it was filmed, it wouldn't be able to be true to life because if there any two English accents many people find hard to understand, it is the Black Country first and Potteries second (Geordie third), and this is the Potteries. I'm British myself, so I don't know what an international audience would make of them.

It would be a good film though, a blend of drama, romance and how the middle classes lived and worked in a manufacturing Northern town where the factories belched out smoke covering everything with a veil of grime. The only relief being Church on Sunday, where the sermons preached holy misogyny and kept workers in their places, praising those who wore the fancy clothes that the exploitation of the labourers afforded them.

Totally rewritten 4 March 2018 after seeing the book on my shelves and remembering how much I liked it. I have over 2,000 books in my home so it can be years before I notice a particular title.

Mas que estar decepcionada con el libro, estoy enfadada, muy enfadada. Tod@s los miembros de #pemberlybooks, otra iniciativa lectora de @LaPeceradeRaquel teníamos muchas expectativas con este libro, y ha sido un bluff para la mayoría.

Personalmente, me he pasado 270 páginas disfrutando de un costumbrismo inglés fin de siglo, con cortejo romántico, un poco de cotilleo rural y una protagonista que poco a poco, de pasiva y sumisa hija, parece ir evolucionando a alguien con personalidad propia, deseosa de ayudar a los demás con su dinero, forjarse un vida y familia propia, muy distinta de la que tiene con su ávaro padre, en definitiva ser un ser humano por derecho propio, y de repente..., en el último capítulo, el autor se descuelga con un final que contradice todo lo que nos ha narrado con anterioridad y la protagonista vuelve a quedar reducida a mujer sacrificada y sometida. Siento que me han tomado el pelo con esta novela.

La edición dÉpoca bonita, como todas la de la editorial, si bien tiene algunos fallos de impresión, con letras poco visibles. Al menos el libro quedará bonito en la estantería.

Arnold Bennett's powerful story of love, tyranny and rebellion set against the vitality and harshness of life in the Staffordshire Potteries in the late nineteenth century, dramatised by Helen Edmundson.

Brought up in the repressive tradition of Methodism by her miserly father, Anna Tellwright dreams of independence and freedom. On coming of age she learns that she is to inherit a fortune and realises that she is loved by the charismatic Henry Mynors. But with the money comes responsibility and a growing bond with one of her tenants William Price.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfz6

Anna of the Five Towns is an example of an intrinsically Victorian genre, the Industrial Novel, and as such can be read on the political as well as the personal level. Bennett’s novel was published in 1902 when industrialisation was firmly entrenched in British society. The Five Towns are a fictionalised Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, centre of the English ceramics industry known as ‘the potteries’.

Bennett grew up in Staffordshire, but left it for London as a young man. Although no doubt he continued to visit, he never again lived there. However, we can see from this book that his childhood home left a deep impression on him. Bennett describes the Five Towns in loving detail. By day it might be a dirty townscape of pottery works and coal mines, but by night it is lit by distant fires which give it a fairyland glamour.

We see the Five Towns through the point of view of Anna Tellwright, who comes of age during the course of this novel. Anna is the daughter of a hardhearted miser who exacts total submission from his daughters. Unlike other Industrial Novels, this book is not about the relationship between owners and workers, with the working class forming merely a backdrop to the action.

Anna’s own development and her relationships are very much the focus of this book, but in the background Bennett explores the workings of the middle class and especially how its subtle economic gradations are acted out within the unifying force of evangelical religion. All the characters co-operate as stalwarts of the church, but their relationships on the economic front are very different. When one of their number is facing ruin none of them lifts a finger to help him while Tellwright gleefully pushes them to the wall. They see the laws of economics as being as inexorable as the laws of God. Anna alone has pity on them and tries to help, but her efforts come to nothing and their fate is inevitable. However, along the way she quite unexpectedly finds love.

In a way, Anna of the Five Towns is about the damaging effects of capitalism on the human soul, but while we the readers see its inhumanity, it is not acknowledged by the characters, but disguised behind a veneer of evangelical piety.

I first read this book many years ago, and saw it as a tragedy in which a young woman is bullied and abused by a miserly father, and what little life she has outside the home is dominated by a narrow minded, joyless Methodism. Even when she inherits a considerable fortune from her mother, she remains in thrall to her father, who manipulates her into behaviour which she finds morally repugnant, but cannot avoid, resulting in further unhappiness from her feelings of guilt. She has a way out when a kind, reliable and successful young Methodist stalwart falls in love with her. She agrees to marry him, though her upbringing has made it difficult form relationships, but too late discovers she is in love with the disgraced victim of her father's machinations, in which she was implicated unwillingly. She makes one big gesture to finally defy her father and save the young man from his fate, but it is too late. At the end she is about to marry her fiancee, live in the house from which the man she loved was evicted, and take her place in the smug, hypocritical society of the provincial industrial town where she lives.
Arnold Bennett grew up in the Potteries, and he describes it evocatively and in detail. His perceptive descriptions of the Methodists and their ways are also first hand. But he didn't like the Potteries or the Methodists, and that comes across clearly. He himself had a tyrannical father and he left home as soon as he could. The theme of the dominating parent ruining the lives of their children is a recurring theme in his work. But here, as in other novels, he is writing about how he imagines the lives of those who stay behind. One thing about them is that while they may be very decent and moral, they are actually very dull. Their parents, Methodism and the potbanks have squeezed out their vitality and zest. Anna may not come across as dull in the novel because we are interested in her feelings and what happens to her, but she actually does nothing but keep an immaculate kitchen, sew, hang curtains, cook, and teach at Sunday school. She is given no intelligent conversation. Bennett himself, apparently, partly hankered for the obedient, domesticated women of his childhood, and it is easy to see why Mynors, a strong Methodist, would be attracted to a dutiful young woman like Anna, though, undoubtedly, he genuinely loves her.
Rereading the book in my mature years, I find the end unconvincing. I think it works as a romantic ending, but experience tells me life isn't like that. I don't believe Anna was really in love with Will; I think she felt sorry for him and protective towards him. She might have believed she was,
when really, she never got to know him. I think Mynors is unfairly criticised. Although he is described as 'a pharisee'. he is consistent in his tact and good sense, and it's frankly unrealistic to criticise him for being pleased to find his fiancee has fifty thousand pounds. As Bennett comments, if Anna had actually told him how she felt about Will and his father, he might have modified his callous-sounding words. Mynors has the vigour and enjoyment of life Anna lacks. I don't think the unhappiness we are warned about throughout the book is inevitable - who's to say he might not have a good effect on her? Anna has to live with her feelings of guilt, but she never finds out Will's true fate. I suppose it's up to the reader to decide whether Anna was just the victim of her father's greed, or whether to some degree she was complicit in what happened.

Anna Tellwright is one of my favourite heroines, coming a close third after Emma Bovary and Tess Durbeyfield. Arnold Bennett, like Hardy, depicts his heroine with warmth and affection, compassionate in her suffering and tolerant of her faults. Writing this novel before D.H. Lawrence's Brangwen novels were published, but working with similar settings, characters and themes, Bennett puts before us poor, narrow-minded and bigoted communities, but he never loses his sense of fun, exaggerating Ephraim's accent, drawing our attention to idiosyncracies of dress and behaviour in his characters and letting, with some enjoyment, those in the wrong arrive at their just desserts. Only at the end is there a wistful sense of his inability to change the course he has plotted for Anna... but I won't give that away.

A surprisingly pleasant read! I went into this book having no clue as to what it was about. The prose is simply beautiful. I think one of its only downsides is that a couple of the chapters are pretty slow paced, but the slowness is nevertheless necessary in many ways. But what stood out to me most is how nicely characterised Anna Tellwright is; she makes a great protagonist with very human flaws and human strengths.
I loved this book and would love to read more of Bennett's Five Towns novels.

A great story. First contrary to the page numbers totalling 506 the novel is 176 pages long. Anna is a lovely lass who lives with a miser grumpy father. A wealthy woman who is introduced to a new side of life on a holiday to the Isle of Man. Intertwined is the tragic story of the Prices her tenants. The ending is a powerful one and the novel captures eloquently the filth and the beauty of the Pottery towns.

My friend asked me for a recommendation for a book with a happy ending. Well, this isn't really it, is it? But I would recommend it to anyone who likes a well told, realistic (re: somewhat sad, nearing tragic) story.

Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways and These

Twain. Other books

Anna of the Five Towns - 1902

Leonora-1903

A Great Man - 1904

Sacred and Profane Love - 1905

(Republished in 1911 as The Book of Carlotta

How To Live on 24 Hours a Day

Tales of the Five Towns - 1905 (short story collection)

Hugo - 1906

The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (short stories 1907)

The Ghost--a Modern Fantasy - 1907

Buried Alive - 1908

The Old Wives' Tale - 1908

The Card - 1910

Denry the Audacious - 1910

Helen with a High Hand - 1910

Hilda Lessways - 1911

The Matador of the Five Towns - (short stories 1912)

The Regent - 1913 (aka America as The Old Adam)

The Price of Love - 1914

These Twain - 1916

The Pretty Lady - 1918

The Roll-Call - 1918

Mr Prohack - 1922

I liked this once I got used to the stilted writing style, which was quite contemporary for the time. I found Anna quite naive and timid, living in the shadow of her miserly father. But her life changed when she inherited a fortune. A sad and unexpected ending.

Arnold Bennett has never been particularly fashionable; Virginia Woolf hadn't much time for him (the feeling was mutual) and French critic George Lafourcade describes Anna of the Five Towns as tending to 'dullness complete and unrelieved'. DH Lawrence also responded negatively to the novel, but then again he dismissed 'all the modern stuff since Flaubert'. Margaret Drabble comes closer to my own view of it: she describes Anna as 'much more spirited [than Balzac's Eugenie Grandet], more modern, more subtle. In fact, she is much more real.'

It is Anna herself who makes this novel come alive. Early on, Anna learns that her coming-of-age inheritance from her mother makes her a very wealthy young woman. However, the money makes no real difference to her life - it is tied up in stocks, shares and businesses and remains under the control of her tyranical father. The world of finance is utterly alien to Anna. She becomes, on her father's advice, the 'sleeping partner' in the firm owned by Henry Mynors, her soon-to-be fiance. Men, it seems, are destined to hold Anna's pursestrings. On the whole, she doesn't mind: modest Anna's wants are few.

Anna is very much her own person, though. She shows this quietly, often with difficulty, such as when she refuses to speak the words 'I am for Christ', which she knows would make Henry and Mrs Sutton (wife of prosperous Alderman Sutton) very happy, because she doesn't feel them in her heart. She risks her father's wrath when she burns the forged document that could have ruined Willie Price, and indeed Anna's father is furious when the deed is discovered, and cannot forgive her.

She and Henry are basically 'good' people - quietly so, without ostentation - and there is no reason to suppose that their marriage will be a miserable one, even though Anna realises that she doesn't love Henry and does love the departing (for Australia) Willie Price. If this is, as DH Lawrence claims, a novel about 'resignation', it's a form of resignation that is easy to identify with. Anna is not heroic (except in small, quiet ways); she is a decent, likeable young woman who will make the best of what life throws at her. I find her wholly admirable