'Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life' Margaret Drabble Growing up in the world of the 'five towns' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold's novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of...
'Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life' Margaret Drabble Growing up in the worl...
You might find it hard to imagine that those stout ageing spinsters living quietly in small English towns ever led lives of passion or hardship, that they ever possessed beauty or romantic ideals. In The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett tells the story of two such old wives, sisters Constance and Sophia, from youth, through marriage, heartbreak, triumphs and disasters, to old age. In doing so, he reveals with careful compassion the intense inner lives that throb beneath every seemingly insignificant exterior.
You might find it hard to imagine that those stout ageing spinsters living quietly in small English towns ever led lives of passion or hardship, that ...
One of fiction's greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great man Set in the raw, Victorian world of the 'Five Towns', The Card tells the extremely funny and tangled story of Denry Machin's rise from mediocrity to fame through a series of ludicrous and yet perversely successful schemes. He dances, pleads, cheats and inspires his way through life in a series of set-pieces which wonderfully evoke a now long-gone world of civic balls, seaside excursions, newspaper boys and patent chocolate remedies. As everybody said after one of his most...
One of fiction's greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great man Set in the raw, Victorian wo...
Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story. Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being...
Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Mi...
Arnold Bennett was born and grew up in Hanley, deep in the heart of the 'Potteries' (his 'Five Towns'), a land scarred and its people debilitated by industrial pollution and greed of gain. He left the area in 1898, aged 21, to work as a solicitor's clerk in London, writing in his spare time for magazines such as Tit-Bits. Bennett was a follower of Guy de Maupassant, believing that interesting and enlightening books could be written around the lives of ordinary people, a view vindicated in 1902, when he began publishing a series of books on life in the Potteries to instant critical...
Arnold Bennett was born and grew up in Hanley, deep in the heart of the 'Potteries' (his 'Five Towns'), a land scarred and its people debilitated b...
Arnold Bennett was born in England's heavily industrialised 'Potteries' district (his fictional 'Five Towns'), leaving for London in 1898, aged 21. Following the success of his first novel, in 1903 he moved to that mecca for all things avant-garde and artistic - Paris.
Bennett was drawn to the French literary styles of naturalism and realism, evolving a brilliant synthesis of the two techniques that he uses with such effect in The Old Wives' Tales. In his journal, he speaks of having been inspired to write the novel by observing an old lady in a cafE in Paris and, looking...
Arnold Bennett was born in England's heavily industrialised 'Potteries' district (his fictional 'Five Towns'), leaving for London in 1898, aged 21....
