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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Set between the Staffordshire Potteries and Paris, The Old Wives' Tale traces the bifurcating lives of Constance and Sophia Baines from youthful shop assistants to old age, through marriage, commerce, flight, and loss. Bennett's spacious realism - precise in material detail, steady in pace, and quietly psychological - turns the ordinary into event. Moving from Bursley's drapery to the 1870-71 Siege of Paris, the novel makes time its protagonist. Within the Edwardian realist tradition and in dialogue with Balzac and Flaubert, it builds moral insight by accumulation. Born in Hanley in the heart of the Five Towns and later resident in Paris, Arnold Bennett fused provincial intimacy with cosmopolitan observation. Journalism disciplined his eye for process - how shops run, money moves, reputations harden. A Parisian glimpse of an aged woman, he said, sparked the inquiry into who she had been. Readers who value breadth of social vision and humane exactness will relish this novel's patient artistry. It rewards admirers of Balzacian panorama and Trollopian society, and it offers a vital counterpoint to modernist caricatures of Bennett. A classic of English realism, it deepens with every return. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The Old Wives' Tale (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Across decades of upheaval, The Old Wives' Tale traces how two sisters measure themselves against the slow turning of time and the quickening pulse of modern life, balancing duty and desire, habit and risk, the gravity of home and the lure of elsewhere, so that ordinary days, shop counters, streets, and rooms become the stage on which persistence contends with change and the smallest choices, made in private, gather the weight of history. It is a story of resilience and surrender, of how lives seemingly modest in scope nevertheless register the pressures of commerce, class, and city life, and of how aging reorders what once felt fixed.
Arnold Bennett’s novel, first published in 1908, belongs to the great realist tradition and is rooted in the English Midlands he called the Five Towns, a fictional rendering of the Staffordshire Potteries. Its action begins in the nineteenth century and extends into the new century, moving between a provincial draper’s shop in Bursley and the cosmopolitan avenues of Paris. Written on the cusp of the Edwardian era, it surveys a society adjusting to modern commerce and urban rhythm while keeping faith with the textures of domestic life, giving readers a portrait both panoramic in scope and minutely attentive in detail.
At its center are two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, who grow up above their family’s draper’s shop, learning the rituals of trade, respectability, and self-command. Their temperaments diverge: one inclines toward steadiness and continuity, the other toward adventure and independence. Circumstance and choice soon part their paths, and the novel follows each course with equal sympathy, returning always to the fabric of daily life from which their fortunes are cut. Without relying on melodrama, the narrative shows how errands, conversations, and workdays incrementally shape character, and how a household can be both refuge and constraint.
Bennett’s voice is calm, observant, and omniscient, a steady guide who lingers over rooms, streets, shop fittings, ledgers, and gestures until the world feels fully habitable. The style favors clarity and patience; scenes accumulate rather than startle, and emotion rises from the pressure of ordinary circumstance. Yet the tone is never merely documentary: there is quiet humor, a humane irony, and a generosity toward weakness that keeps judgment at bay. The result is a novel that rewards unhurried reading, attentive to cadence and context, and that makes even minor transactions gleam with significance without straining for effect.
Time is the governing theme: the way bodies age, neighborhoods transform, businesses rise and settle into habit, and memories harden into family legend. Alongside time runs the question of women’s agency within domestic and commercial spheres, as the sisters test the limits of obedience, ambition, and care. The book attends to work—pricing goods, managing staff, serving customers—as a moral and social theater. It considers class sensibility without caricature, and it balances provincial rootedness against metropolitan restlessness. Throughout, it insists that dignity is earned in ordinary acts, and that character is not a sudden revelation but a long apprenticeship.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s patience is radical, reminding us that the currents shaping a life—care work, financial strain, the tug between home and mobility—rarely arrive as grand events. Its portrait of women negotiating expectation and opportunity remains resonant, as do its scenes of labor under the gaze of customers and creditors. The tension between community ties and the promise of a larger world mirrors current debates about migration, aspiration, and belonging. Above all, Bennett dignifies experience that often goes unrecorded, offering an ethics of attention that speaks to our distracted age and restores value to the everyday.
Appearing as British fiction moved toward experiment, Bennett’s achievement stands as a confident alternative: deeply traditional in form yet expansive in social reach, a novel that trusts realism to reveal complexity. Readers approaching it today can expect breadth rather than bravura, and a narrative architecture that accumulates meaning scene by scene. The sisters’ contrasting courses allow the book to illuminate both continuity and disruption without forcing a lesson, and its final impression is earned by years of lived texture. Enter with patience and curiosity, and you will find a world that feels complete enough to walk around in and remember.
Synopsis
Published in 1908, The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett is a panoramic realist novel within his Five Towns cycle, tracing ordinary lives with uncommon amplitude. It follows two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, daughters of a draper in the Potteries town of Bursley, as their choices send them along divergent paths. Bennett situates their private struggles within broader social change in nineteenth-century England and continental Europe, attending to work, family, and the quiet pressures of respectability. The book's structure progresses from their youth to old age, showing how character is tested by time, and how domestic spaces can hold epic tensions.
Early chapters immerse the reader in the regulated world of the Baines household, where Mrs. Baines presides over the drapery with vigilant authority. Constance, conscientious and affectionate, learns the rhythms of trade and propriety; Sophia, sharper and more restless, resists the constraints of provincial order. Samuel Povey, a capable assistant, embodies the promise of steady domestic partnership, while the arrival of commercial traveler Gerald Scales introduces a different allure of mobility and romance. Through small crises in the shop and at home, Bennett establishes the sisters' temperaments, the moral codes governing them, and the latent conflict between duty and desire.
A pivotal decision divides the sisters' courses. Constance remains in Bursley, aligning herself with the predictable securities of the family business and the companionship of Samuel Povey. Sophia, moved by a contrary impulse, leaves with Gerald for Paris, trusting charm and novelty over certitude. Bennett does not sensationalize their choice so much as trace its consequences in practical detail, showing how a single act reconfigures ties of kinship, reputation, and self-conception. The narrative bifurcates, alternating settings and tones, yet maintains a shared concern with how individuals make do within the limits of their circumstances and the pressures of passing years.
In Bursley, Constance's life acquires the texture of ongoing management: balancing accounts, keeping house, and nurturing a son, Cyril, whose growth introduces both pride and anxiety. The shop's fortunes require vigilance as tastes and methods shift, and marriage brings warmth tempered by periodic strain. Bennett's emphasis is on continuities and incremental change, rendering the satisfactions and burdens of constancy. Domestic ordeals, community obligations, and unexpected losses test her steadiness without erasing her capacity for care. Through her, the novel observes the transformation of a provincial town and the complexities of middle-class respectability, where stability demands continual, often quiet, effort.
Sophia's Paris years unfold against a more volatile backdrop. The promise of romantic adventure gives way to precarious realities as Gerald's unreliable conduct exposes the risks of dependence. Historical events, including the Siege of Paris, tighten constraints and force resourcefulness, and Sophia learns to convert prudence and will into practical solvency. Bennett's Paris is neither exoticized nor condemned; it is a testing ground where hardship can refine competence. Gradually, Sophia moves toward a more self-directed existence, discovering avenues of work and independence that were muted at home, while still carrying the imprint of her upbringing and its expectations.
As decades accumulate, both narratives register the erosion and accrual that time imposes: ambitions scale back or clarify, habits harden or soften, and the sisters reckon with aging, memory, and the temper of a new century. The novel contemplates family estrangement and renewed contact, weighing the costs of pride and the claims of affection without insisting on simple repairs. In Bursley, civic improvements and commercial consolidation alter familiar streets; in Paris, different rhythms of modern life prevail. Bennett keeps attention fixed on ordinary negotiations-between parents and children, employers and employees, the self and its former selves-while hinting at eventual reckonings.
By setting contrasting lives in parallel, Bennett advances a quietly radical claim: that the full measure of experience resides in untheatrical persistence as much as in bold departures. The Old Wives' Tale endures for its unsentimental empathy, its meticulous account of work and aging, and its clear-eyed view of women acting within and against social limits. Its spacious chronology turns everyday compromise, resilience, and small courage into a history worth remembering. Without relying on melodramatic revelations, the novel invites reflection on what is chosen, what is endured, and how time confers meaning, giving the sisters' separate journeys a resonant, spoiler-safe closure.
Historical Context
Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) is set chiefly in the industrial Potteries district of North Staffordshire, which he fictionalized as the Five Towns. Drawing on his Hanley upbringing and journalistic eye, Bennett locates the narrative in mid-Victorian provincial England and carries it into the Edwardian moment. The book belongs to the tradition of European and British realism, emphasizing ordinary lives, work, and institutions. Its milieu features small businesses, chapels, railway stations, police courts, and municipal boards that administered sanitation and street improvements. Bennett’s detailed social topography situates characters within the rhythms of a manufacturing community undergoing rapid but uneven modernization.
In Bennett’s model of Bursley (based on Burslem), the skyline of bottle ovens and workshops evokes the Staffordshire pottery industry, dominated by firms such as Wedgwood, Minton, and numerous smaller manufactories. The factory system structured daily life, from whistle times to piecework, while hazards from lead glazes and silica dust were widely recognized. Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875, together with local sanitary committees, pressed for cleaner water, sewerage, and smoke abatement, though enforcement varied. Nonconformist congregations and friendly societies offered mutual aid amid cyclical trade booms and slumps. This industrial environment frames the novel’s attention to routine, thrift, and hard-won respectability.
Central to the book’s texture is the nineteenth-century drapery and general outfitting trade, a mainstay of provincial shopping streets. Assistants commonly lived on the premises under strict rules, with long hours softened only gradually by the Early Closing Movement and Shop Hours Acts of the 1890s. Credit, club payments, and seasonal sales fostered customer loyalty. As ready-made clothing expanded and department stores such as Whiteleys in London and Le Bon Marché in Paris set new standards of display, shopkeepers adapted by emphasizing service and reliability. Women’s participation in family shops offered recognized—if circumscribed—paths to economic responsibility and local standing.
Expanding transport and communications reconfigured horizons. The Trent and Mersey Canal already bound the Potteries to wider markets, and from 1848 the North Staffordshire Railway linked Burslem and Hanley to Crewe, Derby, and beyond. Cheap excursion fares and reliable timetables normalized regional travel, while the electric telegraph and improved postal services accelerated news and business correspondence. Cross-Channel steamers and rail connections made journeys to Paris achievable for middle-class Britons. These networks underpin the novel’s sense of mobility and contingency: a missed train, a forwarded letter, or a ticket bought on impulse becomes plausible within an England whose tempo quickened with steel rails.
Across the Channel, Paris was transformed under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Between 1853 and 1870, Baron Haussmann’s renovation cut boulevards, modernized sewers, and fostered department-store display culture that attracted European visitors. The city then endured the Franco-Prussian War; the Siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 brought rationing, bombardment, and balloon-post ingenuity. Britain remained neutral but closely followed events through newspapers and eyewitness accounts. The novel incorporates this crisis by placing an English observer within a besieged metropolis, using concrete, public hardships—notably scarcity and civil strain—to test private endurance and to contrast provincial security with continental upheaval.
Victorian social norms shaped expectations of duty, piety, and self-help. The Potteries were a stronghold of Methodism, including Primitive Methodist traditions that emphasized lay preaching and temperance. Respectability was measured by chapel attendance, thrift, and household order. Legal reforms slowly adjusted women’s status: the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 created civil divorce, and the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 enabled wives to own earnings and property. Within these constraints, women often managed shops, lodgings, and accounts. Bennett’s characters negotiate this world of rules and reputations, where a public misstep could imperil trade, marriage prospects, or standing in the pews.
Education and culture broadened over the period the novel covers. The Elementary Education Act 1870 established elected school boards, with later measures making primary schooling compulsory and, by 1891, free. Sunday schools and Mechanics’ Institutes had long fostered literacy. Circulating libraries, notably Mudie’s, shaped middle-class reading habits, while cheap newspapers expanded provincial horizons. Technical instruction in design and firing improved ceramic standards, supported by later legislation such as the Technical Instruction Act 1889. The Arts and Crafts movement influenced taste in household goods. Bennett records how these institutions of learning and consumption shaped aspiration, conversation, and the decor of parlors and shops.
Published on the cusp of the 1910 federation of the Potteries into the county borough of Stoke-on-Trent, the novel looks back on a society before administrative consolidation and mass motor transport. Bennett’s meticulous realism, informed by Balzac and Flaubert, documents how industrial capitalism, consumer culture, and religious discipline organized ordinary existence. Without sensationalism, he critiques parochial rigidity and celebrates endurance, noticing how public events—from a sale day to a siege—press on private choices. By tracing decades in two provincial lives, the work reflects the transitions between Victorian and Edwardian England and invites readers to measure comfort against the costs of change.
The Old Wives' Tale (Summarized Edition)
Preface to this Edition
In autumn 1903 I often dined on the Rue de Clichy. A pale beautiful waitress worked far from my seat; a stout Breton matron ruled my table, chiding, "What! you are unfaithful to me?" and, when I grumbled at French beans, declaring I knew nothing about them. Resolved on eternal infidelity, I planned to quit. Just before leaving an obese, shapeless old woman, arms full of parcels, wandered from chair to chair, dropping bundles, gesturing and squeaking until the room roared. Laughter on the pale girl’s face hurt me. I thought, every stout ageing woman was once slim and radiant; her unnoticed metamorphosis is tragic.
In that instant the scheme for the book that became The Old Wives’ Tale flared. The diner was too old and unsympathetic; a heroine must slip unremarked through a crowd. I revered Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s Aunt Anne yet missed many things in it, loathed the unfading youth of standard heroines, and was already daring reviewers with Leonora, a lady of forty. Maupassant’s Une Vie, once revered, challenged me: I would ‘go one better’ by giving two heroines. Constance came naturally; Sophia was bravado. Though daunted, I swore to proceed, put the notion aside while tossing off lesser novels, and waited for courage.
In 1907, lodged near Fontainebleau in a retired railwayman’s house, I began, guessing two-hundred-thousand words—accurate—and learning Victorian giants ran to twice that. Six weeks produced the first part drawn from childhood in the Baines draper’s shop. London distractions stopped me; I dashed off Buried Alive, returned, and finished in July 1908. Publication met six weeks of chilly praise, 'honest but dull… facetious,' then warmed. Chronology let me add the Siege; I quizzed my landlord and his wife, skimmed Sarcey’s diary, Claretie’s pictures, documents, and no more. For the execution scene I used newspaper articles; Frank Harris scoffed, I confessed, he replied, 'Neither have I.
