The Old Wives' Tale (Great Classics #60)

Arnold Bennett

$24.46

This product is not returnable.

Publication Date: October 5th, 2016

Publisher:

Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

ISBN:

9781539360018

Pages:

508

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Description

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We follow the story of the sisters' two-penny lives. They live in a small English provincial town above their father's draper's shop. We see them when they were small girls, grow up to be young women: Constance marrying a local guy (and later inheriting her father's business), while the more spirited Sophia steals money from her aunt and elopes with a playboy traveling businessman to Paris.

She remains childless, abandoned by her husband, but by stroke of luck was able to put up a business and prospered. Constance, on the other hand, stays in their town, has a son, sees her loved ones grow old and die one by one (her parents, friends, her husband). Her son leaves to seek his fortune elsewhere.

In old age the sisters are briefly reunited. They share problems with house helps, their dogs, and Constance's son's apparent neglect of her. Then they, too, die one by one.

This is a masterpiece of realistic writing, Bennett's description of the everyday, humdrum happenings of ordinary 19th century people pulls you inside the book and makes you feel the characters like they're real flesh-and-blood. It's an exciting, "unputdownable reading" frenzy of non-events.

A remarkable example of the old-fashioned way of telling a story, utilizing no attention-getting, sophisticated-sounding modern tricks.

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About the Author

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 - 27 March 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film. Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley is one of a conurbation of six towns which were joined together at the beginning of the 20th century as Stoke-on-Trent. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family moved to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem. Bennett was educated locally in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Bennett won a literary competition hosted by Tit-Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full-time. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial which was bought by the syndicate for £75 (equivalent to £10,000 in 2015). He then wrote another. This became The Grand Babylon Hotel. Just over four years later, his first novel, A Man from the North, was published to critical acclaim and he became editor of the magazine. In 1903, he moved to Paris, where other great artists from around the world had converged on Montmartre and Montparnasse. Bennett spent the next eight years writing novels and plays One of His Quotes Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.