"A masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion."
No wonder Arnold Bennett despised the literati of his day and avoided their company - a victim of their snobbery and Virginia Woolf’s outright mockery of his writing, he remained disdainful his whole life of the elitism he found amongst his contemporaries.
Yet he was extremely successful financially and extraordinarily prolific. Between 1892 and 1931, he wrote 34 novels, endless articles and reviews, short stories, plays and wrote a daily journal. He also spent some years as an editor at Woman Magazine which, he claimed, helped him to learn a great deal about the secret nature of women as well as about ‘frocks and household management.’
I agree with him. Bennett’s ability to explore the emotions and complexities of his female characters, to portray them with acute sensitivity and insight is, for me, one of the highlights of his novels.
The Old Wives’ Tale was published in 1908 and I first read it at the age of 20, prescribed reading for the Modern Fiction course of my English Lit degree. I loved it then – for its narrative, spanning the second half of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th, the carefully evoked settings of provincial Bursley in the Potteries and Paris, and the host of vividly and sympathetically drawn characters.
But coming back to the novel, decades later, is to find, of course, so very much more.
Bennett sets his protagonists against the backdrop of key social and political moments in both Bursley and Paris and such events certainly play an overarching role. But it is really the effect of time itself upon human lives that is his subject, the inevitable yet bewildering rapid passing of time – something that was of no particular interest when I read the novel at the age of 20 but decades on, resounds starkly.
Constance and Sophia Baines, sisters appropriately defined by their names, grow up in the family drapers’ shop in the square in Bursley with conflicting desires for their lives. Constance, biddable, acquiescent, anticipates a predicable path whilst Sophia, restless, rebellious, seeks something far beyond such a prescribed existence. Rashly eloping with the handsome travelling salesman, Gerald Scales, she is soon living with him somewhat precariously in Paris.
Bennett himself was living in Paris when he wrote the novel which was inspired, as he states in his journal, by an encounter with a solitary middle-aged woman, inordinately stout and with pendent cheeks in a Parisian restaurant. Initially repulsed by her, he consequently became curious about what lay in her past to bring her to that moment – she was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful …her case is a tragedy.
The novel is structured in four parts, namely Mrs Baines, Constance, Sophia, whilst the fourth entitled What Life Is reunites the sisters towards the end of their lives after many years estranged and is intensely poignant as the two women confront the disparity between their adolescent hopes and the realities that time has wrought. ‘And what have I lived for? What is the meaning of it?’ The riddle of life itself was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow, Bennett tells us of the once impulsive and ardent Sophia.
To me, The Old Wives’ Tale is a masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion. Yet it tells the story of two women (three including the matriarchal Mrs Baines) who discover their own strength and resilience when the lives they had anticipated take very different turns, a theme as relevant now as when the novel was published in 1908. Both sisters find themselves victims of circumstance, of domestic as well as political change and twists of fate. Sophia does more than simply survive the Siege of Paris and the Commune of 1870 and prospers, discovering a stalwart, astute mentality to replace her youthful fecklessness whilst Constance, wishing only for the predictability of Bursley and the drapers’ shop, is forced to confront events that threaten such prosaic stability.
But then this is a realist novel. Bennett believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and the concerns of his novels are the concerns of ordinary lives perpetually shadowed by the extraordinary. As Sophia observes towards the end of her life, humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses and The Old Wives’ Tale catches this very simple yet startling truth.
The literary cliques and elites that Bennett so despised might have scorned his concern with the mundane and commonplace, but, like the greatest and most enduring of writers, his strength lies in his ability to portray such lives with empathy and conviction.
The Old Wives’ Tale is a memorable and masterful example of his craft.
The Old Wives' Tale is published by Penguin Classics.
Yet he was extremely successful financially and extraordinarily prolific. Between 1892 and 1931, he wrote 34 novels, endless articles and reviews, short stories, plays and wrote a daily journal. He also spent some years as an editor at Woman Magazine which, he claimed, helped him to learn a great deal about the secret nature of women as well as about ‘frocks and household management.’
I agree with him. Bennett’s ability to explore the emotions and complexities of his female characters, to portray them with acute sensitivity and insight is, for me, one of the highlights of his novels.
The Old Wives’ Tale was published in 1908 and I first read it at the age of 20, prescribed reading for the Modern Fiction course of my English Lit degree. I loved it then – for its narrative, spanning the second half of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th, the carefully evoked settings of provincial Bursley in the Potteries and Paris, and the host of vividly and sympathetically drawn characters.
But coming back to the novel, decades later, is to find, of course, so very much more.
Bennett sets his protagonists against the backdrop of key social and political moments in both Bursley and Paris and such events certainly play an overarching role. But it is really the effect of time itself upon human lives that is his subject, the inevitable yet bewildering rapid passing of time – something that was of no particular interest when I read the novel at the age of 20 but decades on, resounds starkly.
Constance and Sophia Baines, sisters appropriately defined by their names, grow up in the family drapers’ shop in the square in Bursley with conflicting desires for their lives. Constance, biddable, acquiescent, anticipates a predicable path whilst Sophia, restless, rebellious, seeks something far beyond such a prescribed existence. Rashly eloping with the handsome travelling salesman, Gerald Scales, she is soon living with him somewhat precariously in Paris.
Bennett himself was living in Paris when he wrote the novel which was inspired, as he states in his journal, by an encounter with a solitary middle-aged woman, inordinately stout and with pendent cheeks in a Parisian restaurant. Initially repulsed by her, he consequently became curious about what lay in her past to bring her to that moment – she was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful …her case is a tragedy.
The novel is structured in four parts, namely Mrs Baines, Constance, Sophia, whilst the fourth entitled What Life Is reunites the sisters towards the end of their lives after many years estranged and is intensely poignant as the two women confront the disparity between their adolescent hopes and the realities that time has wrought. ‘And what have I lived for? What is the meaning of it?’ The riddle of life itself was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow, Bennett tells us of the once impulsive and ardent Sophia.
To me, The Old Wives’ Tale is a masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion. Yet it tells the story of two women (three including the matriarchal Mrs Baines) who discover their own strength and resilience when the lives they had anticipated take very different turns, a theme as relevant now as when the novel was published in 1908. Both sisters find themselves victims of circumstance, of domestic as well as political change and twists of fate. Sophia does more than simply survive the Siege of Paris and the Commune of 1870 and prospers, discovering a stalwart, astute mentality to replace her youthful fecklessness whilst Constance, wishing only for the predictability of Bursley and the drapers’ shop, is forced to confront events that threaten such prosaic stability.
But then this is a realist novel. Bennett believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and the concerns of his novels are the concerns of ordinary lives perpetually shadowed by the extraordinary. As Sophia observes towards the end of her life, humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses and The Old Wives’ Tale catches this very simple yet startling truth.
The literary cliques and elites that Bennett so despised might have scorned his concern with the mundane and commonplace, but, like the greatest and most enduring of writers, his strength lies in his ability to portray such lives with empathy and conviction.
The Old Wives’ Tale is a memorable and masterful example of his craft.
The Old Wives' Tale is published by Penguin Classics.
The Legacy of Mr Jarvis by Jude Hayland is published by Matador.
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