Novel
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett · 1908
Opening lines
Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Bursley, a small town in the Potteries of Staffordshire. Constance and Sophia Baines grow up above their parents' draper's shop, beside a father paralysed by a stroke whom they take turns to watch over. Constance is sensible and marries the shop's assistant, Samuel Povey. Sophia, who is not, runs off with a commercial traveller, who marries her in London and then takes her to Paris, where he squanders her inheritance and abandons her. The siege of 1870 finds her alone in the city, where she runs a boarding house.
Context
The idea came to its author in the autumn of 1903, in a restaurant on the rue de Clichy in Paris, in front of a fat and ridiculous old woman of whom he told himself that she had been young and slim, and that the change had come about through an infinity of tiny changes, none of which had been perceived. He first wanted to write the English equivalent of a French novel of 1883 that follows a woman from her youth to her old age, then decided to do better and to tell the lives of two women instead of one: the first alone had come from the restaurant, the second was born of a challenge. The novel, completed in July 1908, appeared in the autumn.
Who it is for
More than six hundred pages; translated into French in 1931 by Marcel de Coppet, with no reissue since.
Prizes and reception
Coldly received for six weeks, according to its author, it is now regarded as a high point of English novelistic realism.
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