Recommendations
Books Like The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
Bennett fiction, Edwardian provincial novels, and books about ordinary lives under the pressure of time
If The Old Wives' Tale moved you with the panoramic account of Constance and Sophia's lives and Bennett's insistence that ordinary provincial existence is as worthy of serious fiction as any epic, these eight works share its naturalist attention to the texture of daily life and its meditation on what time does to people.
- 1
Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's Victorian masterpiece of provincial life — what it does to large souls and frustrated ambition; the great predecessor to Bennett's project of treating ordinary provincial existence with full literary seriousness.
- 2
Buy on AmazonClayhanger
by Arnold Bennett
Bennett's follow-up Five Towns novel — Edwin Clayhanger's life from printer's apprentice to maturity; eventually intersects with Sophia's story; essential Bennett.
- 3
Buy on AmazonA Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's 1869 novel of a young man whose life doesn't live up to his dreams — Bennett's explicit model for the treatment of provincial life; Frédéric Moreau's story is what Sophia Baines might have become if her Paris years had gone differently.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
Galsworthy's multi-volume chronicle of a Victorian and Edwardian bourgeois family — the same territory as Bennett's Five Towns in trilogy form, published across roughly the same years.
- 5Buy on Amazon
Tono-Bungay
by H.G. Wells
Wells's 1909 novel of Edwardian social mobility — a young man's rise through the English class system; the most novelistic of Wells's fiction, published the year after The Old Wives' Tale.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Lampedusa's 1958 novel of an aristocratic Sicilian family's decline during the Risorgimento — the same meditation on what time takes from people and places; 'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.'
- 7
Buy on AmazonBuddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Mann's 1901 family saga of a Lübeck merchant family's decline across four generations — the German parallel to Bennett's account of bourgeois provincial life under the pressure of modernity.
- 8
Buy on AmazonAnna of the Five Towns
by Arnold Bennett
Bennett's 1902 earlier Five Towns novel — a young woman's life under her domineering father; more concentrated than The Old Wives' Tale and a good introduction to Bennett's world.
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