On her twenty-first birthday, Anna Tellwright learns that she is a wealthy woman — heir to a fortune of fifty thousand pounds. It changes nothing she can feel. Her father, Ephraim Tellwright, a cold and joyless miser, goes on managing every penny, doling out housekeeping shillings, and dominating her absolutely. Anna is an heiress kept on an allowance, owner of property she has never seen and tenants she has never met. Among that property is a failing earthenware manufactory leased by Titus Price and worked by his gentle, slow-witted son, Willie. The rent is overdue, and at her father's cold prompting Anna is made the unwilling instrument of the debt's collection — drawn, against every kind instinct, into another family's downfall. Around this hard fact Bennett arranges her quiet life: the fervent Methodist community of the town, a sweeping religious revival, and her tentative, half-understood feelings for the capable suitor Henry Mynors. As the Price affair moves toward bankruptcy, forgery, and a lonely suicide, Anna is forced toward the choice that will settle the whole shape of her future. Published in 1902, Anna of the Five Towns was Arnold Bennett's first novel of the Staffordshire Potteries — the smoke-blackened industrial district he would make his great subject in The Old Wives' Tale and the Clayhanger trilogy. Rendering the kilns, the chapels, and the small relentless economies of provincial life with the patient exactness of the French realists he admired, Bennett finds genuine tragedy in the most unglamorous of worlds. It is a book about money and paternal tyranny — Ephraim Tellwright is one of the great misers of English fiction — and, beneath that, about a woman's thwarted autonomy: a young woman whose conscience, capacity for love, and instinct toward kindness are all alive, and who lacks only the freedom to act on them. Its quiet, desolating close is among the most unforgettable in English fiction.
