In the last year I have read two powerful novels by Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives’ Tale. Both books are first rate, and I wonder why Bennett is not more widely known. Anna of the Five Towns tells the story of the struggle of a young woman to gain independence from her miserly and controlling father at the end of the nineteenth century. (She succeeds but pays a price) The Old Wives’ Tale tells the intertwining stories of two sisters over the space of a lifetime and is really a masterpiece. However, I find myself wondering how it is that Bennett chose to work with female protagonists in these novels and whether this is typical or atypical of his work. I suppose I will have to keep reading more Arnold Bennett to come up with an explanation.

What an austerely beautiful novel. It took me back to reading D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf as a teen (same era and same country). It moved me and made me cry and it horrified me emotionally a little. I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece by any means - it is ordinary - but, gentle and easy to read, it worked for me for obscure reasons. Probably because it is subtle, and real, and sad.

Set in a small town of the Staffordshire Potteries at the turn of the nineteenth century, Anna, the main character is the daughter of a rich miser. She keeps house for him along with her little sister Agnes and is courted by a popular local businessman, Mr Mynors. There is even a trip to the Isle of Man with the more socially sophisticated Suttons. This is the story of Anna's coming of age and finding her place in the world - from religious belief to the clothes she needs for society - or more gravely, to the money she inherits and of how her father's hard-headed business practices negatively affect a tenant businessman and his son, and of Anna's relations with them since it is actually her money that has been invested in them.

Un po’ terra natale del realista inglese Arnold Bennett, Le “Cinque Città” sono quella parte dello Staffordshire chiamata “Potteries” (Terrecotte), in relazione alle sue fabbriche, oppure proprio “Five Towns” (appunto le Cinque Città).

Cresciuta dove le angherie morali del dispotico padre erano all’ordine del giorno, Anna Tellwright si trova tout après al centro dell'interesse di Henry Mynors, bello, intelligente, nonché pilastro dell’industria locale.

L’universo malinconico, grigio e fumoso della regione industriale dello Staffordshire ricorda un po’ il Nord del bellissimo “North and South” di Elizabeth Gaskell (aww, John Thornton..*sospiri d’amore*) e “Shirley” di Charlotte Bronte e nella mia libreria questo bel volumetto di Bennett ha trovato il suo spazietto vitale proprio accanto a questi due altri capolavori.

Dato che il romanzo trae libera ispirazione da "Eugenie Grandet" di Balzac, quest’ultimo è uno dei prossimi in lettura.

“Aveva succhiato col latte materno la profonda verità che la vita della donna è sempre una rinuncia, più o meno grande: la sua, per caso, era stata grande”.

This novel held a particular interest for me having specialised in ceramics at college in Stoke-on-Trent. The methods described of industrial ceramic ware production were accurate and nostalgically familiar. The vista of the bottle kilns of The Potteries a fond memory.
Arnold Bennett is a skilful author, and I greatly enjoyed his style of describing, scenes, objects, personalities, relationships, social norms of the era, and his characters' emotions. It is a view into a bygone world, and especially the lot of women at that time.
It is a realistic story which does not indulge the wish for neatness and a happy ending so often yearned by the reader. In fact I had to read the last pages several times, and look up study notes about the novel before I fully grasped the tragic implication of the final paragraph. It is the right ending, but not a happy one - though at least Anna, the protagonist, remains happily ignorant of it. I might have felt sorry for Henry Mynors, the man she marries but does not love, had he not experienced quite so much delight at finding out about her wealth and such willingness to take control of it.

A plot summary would make this short, but perfectly formed novel sound parochial, unoriginal and maybe dull. It is not. Bennett is a wonderful observer and writer of the small-scale aspects that make life real and characters spring to life. He's also pretty good at writing female characters. In fact, by far the weakest character is male: the faultless Henry Mynors.

In many ways, my life is utterly different from Anna's, but in some key ways, I can identify with her more than I might wish to.

This book is rather like a factory Anna visits: "No stage of the manufacture was incredible by itself, but the result was incredible."

This isn't one of his lightly humorous books (The Grand Babylon Hotel and The Card).

Instead, it features a profoundly nasty man, who never lays a finger on anyone or commits any crime.

Setting and Plot

It's as simple as it says on the back of the book: it's set in the English potteries district, in the early 20th century. Anna Tellwright is about to come of age, and lives with her wealthy, miserly, twice-widowed father (Ephraim) and young half sister (Agnes) in a Methodist-dominated town. Ephraim "existed within himself, unrevealed" even to Anna.

Anna is dutiful, naive, lonely: "the peculiarity of her position... awe and pity were equally mingled" and unfamiliarity with social situations mean she is not "a facile talker".

She inherits money, is taken under the wing of the Suttons, is courted by up-and-coming Henry Mynors, still cares about the fate of the less fortunate (Titus Price and his adult son, Willie), and is very unsure of herself. When invited to a sewing party, she is baffled by the etiquette: "Should she arrive early, in which case she would have to talk more, or late, in which case there would be the ordeal of entering a crowded room?" Who of us has not felt a similar dilemma, even with more experience?

However, she is not mistress of her own destiny, and that is where the tension springs from.

What is love?

Anna's stirrings of love, her excitement and uncertainty ring very true: "the man whose arm she could have touched... She had felt happy and perturbed in being so near him... already she knew his face by heart."

She is afraid and excited, and everything looks different, "She saw how miserably narrow, tepid and trickling the stream of her life had been.. Now it gushed forth warm, impetuous and full." She is even tempted to neglect her duty to her family (only in trivial ways).

Henry calms many of her fears: he's wonderful with Agnes, and even with her father - teasing the former, and braving the latter (even daring to ask for more beef).

However, just when she should be happiest, she feels "no ineffable rapture, not ecstatic bliss." Despite her yearnings, Anna lacks passion, whether for a man or for God (see the Revival section, below). She tries to live as if she has it for both, hoping it will become true.

I also questioned Henry's love for Anna: he seems too perfect and, given his strong religious faith, oddly unperturbed by her lack of conviction (though her dedication is admirable).

Anna's love of her sister is unquestioned and unquestioning, but her feelings about her manipulative father are more complex: "The worst tyrannies of her father never dulled the sense of her duty to him."

Money

Ephraim Tellwright is a former Methodist preacher, but he's a very un-Christian emotional bully. The love of money is perhaps the root of his evil. He is a canny investor, a harsh landlord, and spends almost nothing, so his wealth has accumulated, and he's very proud of how well he's managed Anna's inheritance before she came of age.

He is shrewd and crafty. He simultaneously minimises his donation to the Sunday school and entraps his indebted tenant by promising to match the tenant's donation. He will also "promise repairs [only] in change for payment of arrears which he knew would never be paid". When he hands Anna's inheritance over, he really does no such thing. He makes her pay cheques in, forces her to write letters against her will, and ensures she daren't ask for a penny for herself. When she wants her cheque book, so she can buy a few clothes to go on holiday with the Suttons, he refuses.

Anna's own attitude to money is very different: she makes all her own clothes, has no servant or carriage, and uses nothing on her hair. "The arrival of money out of space, unearned, unasked, was a disturbing experience." "She wanted to test the actuality of this apparent dream by handling a coin and causing it to vanish over counters." The trouble is, she's now too rich to ask her father for any of his money, but she can't use her own, as he's tied her into a business agreement with someone. On holiday with the Suttons, she is startled by their "amazing habit of always buying the best of everything."

Ephraim

It's not only money that makes him mean. Anna and Agnes live in fear of his temper. His "terrible displeasure permeated the whole room like an ether, invisible but carrying vibrations to the heart." The mindset behing his bullying misogyny are chillingly exposed: "The women of the household were the natural victims of their master" who had "certain rights over the self-respect, the happiness, the peace of the defenceless souls set under him." When she is engaged, he claims her suitor is only after her money.

Revival

Anna has been raised a Methodist and teaches in Sunday School, but feels like an outsider as she's never had a conversion experience. Guilt is not just a prerogative of Roman Catholics.

There is excitement at the prospect of a campaign, featuring a famous preacher with an "ineffably wicked" past: "the faint rumour of that dead wickedness clung to his name like a piquant odour".

In preparation, Anna visits the families of Sunday School children and "found joy in the uncongenial and ill-performed task", both as a penance and because Henry asked her to do it.

In the service, he "had two audiences: God and the congregation". The mesmerising techniques, Biblical exhortations, emotional pressure, guilt, and concern are carefully described: I didn't quite believe (in) him, but wasn't certain that he was a charlatan either: "he had an extraordinary histrionic gift and he used it with imagination".

Poor Anna "was in despair at her own predicament and the sense of sin was not more strong than the sense of being confused and publicly shamed... She heaped up all the wickedness of a lifetime... and found horrid pleasure in the exaggeration... She had never doubted... Jesus died on the cross to save her soul... What then was lacking?" She is tormented by whether to go forward as a penitent, and more, by the knowledge she can't.

When she most needs faith, it fails her. She can't turn to Henry, because he is too pure

I have been Anna. I know all those services, techniques and
feelings. I am now free (despite a painful glimpse back, via this book), and I wanted her to be too.

Consequences

The key part of the plot is a factory, now owned by Anna, that is rented by Titus Price, a feckless man, deep in debt, with a sweet but ineffectual son, Willie.

Ephraim is keen for Anna to keep squeezing them for the rent arrears - a task Anna is not comfortable with. Worse still, Ephraim adds further pressure and threats behind her back. When Titus commits suicide, Anna blames her father and herself - even though the inquest finds other factors, such as embezzling church money. From this, everything in Anna's life is jeopardised.

Ending

Gasp! I didn't expect or want a clichéd happy ending or a shockingly tragic one, but I wasn't expecting this, and I'm not sure how I'd describe it (a bit of both?), so I won't!

Anna believes "A woman's life is always a renunciation" (not necessarily of what the reader expects). I don't think Arnold Bennett believes it should be, though. He was a man ahead of his time.

Period Surprises

The men (some shirtless) working alongside women in the pottery works was a surprise. More surprising still, was good Christians deliberately providing opportunity for a couple (not even engaged) to spend time alone together. Mind you, she did wear a "skirt which showed three inches of ankle"!

Maybe my history is at fault, though; this was published in 1902, so it just sneaks into the Edwardian, rather than Victorian category.


Quotes - Scenery and Atmosphere

Most of Bennett's books are set in the area he knew well. He portrays small town politics, industry, rivalries, and even makes factories seem beautiful.

"Burning ironstone glowed with all the strange colours of decadence... unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime... enchanted air... a romantic scene"!

The towns are "forbidding of aspect - sombre, hard-featured, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys had soiled and shrivelled the surrounding country" to a "gaunt and ludicrous travesty of rural charms". This then segues into something rather different: "embrace the whole smoke-girt amphitheatre... this disfigurement is merely an episode in the unending warfare of man and nature and calls for no contrition... Nature is repaid for some of her notorious cruelties."

Factories can be cruel, though. The women paintresses, a few "die of lead poisoning - a fact which adds pathos to their frivolous charm. One paints nothing but circles, the "summit of monotony... stupendous phenomenon of absolute sameness."

Of those visiting a new park, "people going up to criticize and enjoy this latest outcome of municipal enterprise... housewives whose pale faces, as of prisoners free only for a while, showed a naive and timorous pleasure in this unusual diversion; young women made glorious by richly coloured stuffs and carrying themselves with the defiant independence of good wages... a small well-dressed group whose studious repudiation of the crowd betrayed a conscious eminence of rank."

Other Quotes

* Leaving Sunday School, the teachers "gradually dropping the pedagogic pose, and happy in the virtual sensation of a duty accomplished."

* An ageing and charitable woman's "bodily frame long ago proved inadequate to the ceaseless demands of a spirit of indefatigably altruistic, and her continuance in activity was notable illustration of the dominion of mind over matter."

* A young woman of 20 "had the lenient curves of absolute maturity."

* A man of 30 had "the elasticity of youth with the firm wisdom of age."

* A spinster "was lovable, but had never been loved... found compensation for the rigour of destiny in gossip, as innocent as indiscreet."

* "It seemed a face for the cloister... resigned and spiritual melancholy peculiar to women who through the error of destiny have been born into a wrong environment."

* "unconsciously-acquired arrogance of one who had always been accustomed to deference."

* "the quiet enchantment of reverie. Her mind... ranged voluptuously free."

* An old dresser: "Seventy years of continuous polishing by a dynasty of priestesses of cleanliness" looked "as though it had never been new."

* "The double happiness of present and anticipated pleasure."

* Bad news spreads: "All knew of the calamity, and had received from it a new interest in life."

Old fashioned spellings:
connexion
manikin
to-day

“She who had never failed in duty did not fail then. She who had always submitted and bowed the head, submitted and bowed the head then. She had sucked in with her mother’s milk the profound truth that a woman’s life is always a renunciation, greater or less.”

This has all the social critique you’d expect from a Victorian novel, especially concerning a woman’s place in society. Bennett pulls no punches with Christianity either. Perhaps what stood out most to me is how this novel is something of an anti-Silas Marner. There, the daughter is the miser’s rescue. Here, the miser is the daughter’s oppression.

(The Literary Life Podcast’s 19 in 2021 Reading Challenge – An obscure book mentioned by Thomas Banks)

Ephraim Tellwright is the landlord from hell. Rich but miserly, he keeps his tenants in squalor while extorting rent which they can't pay. He is equally tyrannical with his two motherless daughters. When his older daughter Anna turns 21, she comes into money of her own and her father insists on her taking over some of his business while still keeping a tight rein on how she conducts it. One day, she commits an act of defiance.
Like most authors of the classics, Arnold Bennett is equally at home in the sensate and intuitive worlds. He paints a vivid picture of the grime and squalor of industrial England in the late 19th century, contrasting it with rare flashes of beauty as seen in a night sky, glimpsed through a factory window or in the natural beauty and freshness of the Isle of Man. His characters engaged me from the opening page. Against the backdrop of Wesleyan Revivalism, his narrative creates a powerful sense of impending doom. However, at only 174 pages, I felt that he didn't allow enough time to develop the relationship between Anna and her two suitors, and after the preceding tensions, the ending was so abrupt that it lost much of its emotional impact. I would still recommend it for the beauty of its writing.

This book becomes better and better with every turn of the page. It is so far away from contemporary writings, yet so relevant. Every chapter is aesthetically, realistically, and intricately woven around Anna of the five towns. It is not an easy read, but that's fun. Why I love this book?
Anna Tellwright is one of my favorite literary heroines. The main reason to love her is that she is a simple, middle-class woman who lacks the luster of the Bennet sisters or elitedom of Mrs. Dalloway. The journey of Anna Tellwright' s growth from a miser and a Christian Methodist's daughter to a woman who desires freedom is realistic. She is the woman of the five towns; ironically, she is not part of the five towns. Anna's independence and identity are related to money and religion along with societal expectations.
"A woman is profoundly interesting to women at two periods only- before she is betrothed, and before she becomes the mother of her firstborn."
She does not become a societal rebel, neither she stays the same, Anna. Bennett did not end the book with her marriage, rather Anna got the agency to give voice to the five towns. Anna has the agency to achieve the freedom she desires, her one last meeting with Willie Price proves it.
Bennett's description of the industrial town is filled with the breeze of romance.
"Twenty miles of uninterrupted flatness and the ship steadily invading that separating solitude, yard by yard, furlong by furlong! The conception awed her. There, a morsel in the waste of the deep, a speck under the infinite sunlight, lay the island, mysterious, enticing, enchanted, a glinting jewel on the sea's bosom, a remote entity fraught with strange secrets. It was all unspeakable."

Lovely moving story.

A Victorian novel set in my home town! I would have liked it to be a bit more fleshed out (and Anna's decisions to be a little more considered), but it's a thematically important novel for the Victorian era and I enjoyed.

Don't let the seemingly pedestrian, workhorse-like prose fool you: this novel pack a wallop. I can say, without exaggeration, that it is one of the most moving works of fiction I've read in a very long time.

this was fun. a lot of twists and turns...

i wish more books has scenes of sewing parties... :)