Reading Order
The Old Wives' Tale Reading Order
The Old Wives' Tale (1908) by Arnold Bennett is the great underrated novel of the Edwardian period — a panoramic account of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, from their girlhood in the Five Towns of the English Midlands in the 1860s through to their old age at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bennett, who was influenced by Flaubert and Maupassant and set out explicitly to write a French naturalist novel about provincial English life, produced a book of extraordinary quiet power: the story of ordinary lives lived under the pressure of time, of how people become who they are, of the gap between youth's sense of infinite possibility and age's knowledge of what was actually possible. Bennett was inspired by the sight of an old woman in a Paris restaurant whom he saw being looked at with mild contempt, and his reflection: 'She was once young and slim and attractive.' The novel is his extended argument against the dismissal of ordinary lives — his insistence that the full-length account of Constance's decades in Bursley and Sophia's years in Paris during the Siege of 1870–71 and her eventual return home contains as much human interest as any history of emperors. Sophia's subplot — her elopement with the charming rogue Gerald Scales, her abandonment, her years of independence running a Paris pension — is almost a separate novel embedded within the quieter story of Constance's domestic life in the Five Towns. Together they make the argument that no life is without drama or without the slow, painful comedy of survival.
Where to start
The Old Wives' Tale — the novel is long (600+ pages) but moves quickly; begin with the sisters' girlhood in Bursley and stay with the alternating domestic and Parisian narratives as they develop.
Complete The Old Wives' Tale Book List
- 1Buy
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett·1908·The novel — Constance and Sophia Baines from girlhood to old age in the Five Towns and Paris. - 2Buy
Clayhanger
Arnold Bennett·1910·Bennett's follow-up novel set in the same Five Towns — Edwin Clayhanger's life from printer's apprentice to mature man. - 3Buy
Anna of the Five Towns
Arnold Bennett·1902·Bennett's earlier Five Towns novel — a young woman's life under her domineering father; more concentrated than The Old Wives' Tale. - 4Buy
Middlemarch
George Eliot·1871·Eliot's novel of provincial life and what it does to large souls — the Victorian predecessor to Bennett's Edwardian project. - 5Buy
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert·1869·Flaubert's novel of a young man whose life doesn't live up to his dreams — Bennett's model for the treatment of provincial life. - 6Buy
The Forsyte Saga
John Galsworthy·1922·Galsworthy's multi-volume novel of a Victorian and Edwardian bourgeois family — the same territory as Bennett's Five Towns, in trilogy form. - 7Buy
Tono-Bungay
H.G. Wells·1909·Wells's novel of Edwardian social mobility — a young man's rise through the class system, published the year after The Old Wives' Tale. - 8Buy
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa·1958·Lampedusa's novel of an aristocratic Sicilian family's decline — the same meditation on time and what it takes from us, in a Southern Italian context.
The Old Wives' Tale — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Old Wives' Tale about?
The Old Wives' Tale follows two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, from their girlhood in Bursley (one of the Five Towns of the English Potteries district, based on Stoke-on-Trent) in the 1860s through to their old age around 1907. Constance stays in Bursley, marries her father's assistant Samuel Povey, and lives the full domestic life of a Five Towns businesswoman. Sophia elopes with the charming Gerald Scales, is abandoned in Paris, survives the Siege of 1870–71, runs a boarding house for decades, and eventually returns to Bursley in old age. The novel is about what time does to people — how large their possibilities feel in youth and how much smaller the actual life is, and the quiet heroism of surviving that reduction.
Why is Arnold Bennett underrated?
Arnold Bennett was extremely famous in his own time — one of the three major Edwardian novelists, alongside H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy — and then was famously dismissed by Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown', which argued that his detailed materialism (his attention to furniture, food, social conditions) failed to capture the essential quality of character that modern fiction required. Woolf's polemic was enormously influential and Bennett's reputation never fully recovered. The irony is that Woolf's critique partly misrepresents what Bennett does: the accumulation of material detail in The Old Wives' Tale serves an account of how lives are shaped by their material conditions that is philosophically as serious as anything in the modernist tradition. He is steadily being reconsidered.
What is the Five Towns in Arnold Bennett's fiction?
The Five Towns is Bennett's name for the Staffordshire Potteries district — the five pottery towns of Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, and Longton, which were federated into the city of Stoke-on-Trent in 1910. Bennett grew up in Burslem and used the Five Towns (calling them Turnhill, Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, and Longshaw in his fiction) as the setting for most of his major work — The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, Anna of the Five Towns, and many of his short stories. The Five Towns in his fiction are an English equivalent of Flaubert's Normandy or Hardy's Wessex — a specific, fully realized region that becomes a vehicle for a general account of provincial English life and consciousness.
What is Bennett's technique in The Old Wives' Tale?
Bennett's technique in The Old Wives' Tale is heavily influenced by French naturalism — particularly Flaubert's Madame Bovary (the predecessor novel of provincial female life and disappointed aspiration) and Maupassant's short fiction. Bennett follows his characters through decades of ordinary life, accumulating domestic and commercial detail in a way that Woolf found claustrophobic but that Bennett intended as a form of respect: these lives, he insisted, are as worthy of full literary treatment as any aristocrat's. The novel's most characteristic effect is the management of time — the way decades can compress into a few sentences, and then a single day can expand into a chapter; the way Bennett conveys both the speed with which life passes and the slowness with which we experience it from the inside.
What should I read after The Old Wives' Tale?
After The Old Wives' Tale, Bennett's own Clayhanger (1910) is the natural next book — set in the same Five Towns, following Edwin Clayhanger's life, and eventually intersecting with Sophia's story. Anna of the Five Towns (1902) is Bennett's earlier, more concentrated Five Towns novel. For the French naturalist tradition Bennett was working in, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Germinal are the key texts. For Edwardian fiction more broadly, H.G. Wells's Tono-Bungay (1909) and John Galsworthy's The Man of Property (the first Forsyte Saga volume, 1906) are the natural contemporaries. For the meditation on provincial life and what time does to people, Middlemarch (George Eliot) is the great Victorian predecessor and Lampedusa's The Leopard the most beautiful later parallel.
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