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The Old Wives' Tale

Arnold Bennett

Book Overview: 

The Old Wives’ Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother’s draper’s shop, into old age. It is generally regarded as one of Bennett’s finest works. It covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Burslem and Paris.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .a tiny locomotive was leading a procession of tiny waggons.

"And those are the navvies!" she murmured.

The unspeakable doings of the navvies in the Five Towns had reached even her: how they drank and swore all day on Sundays, how their huts and houses were dens of the most appalling infamy, how they were the curse of a God-fearing and respectable district! She and Gerald Scales glanced down at these dangerous beasts of prey in their yellow corduroys and their open shirts revealing hairy chests. No doubt they both thought how inconvenient it was that railways could not be brought into existence without the aid of such revolting and swinish animals. They glanced down from the height of their nice decorum and felt the powerful attraction of similar superior manners. The manners of the navvies were such that Sophia could not even regard them, nor Gerald Scales permit her to regard them, without blushing.

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Community Reviews

I recall intensely that The Old Wives' Tale had me weeping silently into my mug of tea on more than one occasion as I followed raptly the ordinary tedious lives of two more than a little irritating women from youth to addled toothlessness, whence are we all doomed, although, one hopes, these days, w

Having read Maupassant’s Une Vie, Arnold Bennett reckoned the time had come for his own epic realist masterpiece, so the formidable chronicler of the late-Victorian bourgeoisie Up North powered through the writing in under a year. The results follow the lives of two sisters from Bursley (now part of

He saw a fat, old, ridiculous, shapeless woman in a restaurant. Then he imagined her once as a vivacious young girl, perhaps pretty when she was a young woman, had some love affairs, married, brought forth children, and now she's like that, most likely alone and forgotten. For a long while he though

This book was a joy to read. The characters of Sophia and Constance were excellent. There lives chalk and cheese. I was not sure what to expect, and aside for some incredibly long sentences it was a great novel of the day to day lives of the two sisters.

The contrast between the two sisters is incred

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