Constance and Sophia Baines are the daughters of a draper in the Staffordshire Potteries, growing up over the family shop in a close, respectable, provincial world. One is steady and dutiful; the other is a restless beauty. From this single household Arnold Bennett sends the two sisters down opposite roads and then watches, with extraordinary patience, what half a century makes of each. Constance stays. She marries the shop assistant, takes over the business, raises a difficult son, is widowed, and grows old in the very rooms where she was born. Sophia runs. Infatuated with a flashy travelling salesman, she elopes, is abandoned, and finds herself stranded and penniless in Paris — where she lives through the Siege of 1870 and builds a respectable life out of sheer hard will. Two sisters, two countries, two temperaments, brought home at last as old women to the same provincial house. Published in 1908 and inspired by Maupassant's Une Vie, The Old Wives' Tale is a realist epic of the unremarkable made monumental. Bennett gives full, unhurried weight to a shop sale, a Christmas dinner, a failing marriage, the small humiliations of age — and out of such ordinary stuff builds a novel whose true subject is time itself, the one antagonist that defeats every character equally. It is a book about the dignity of ordinary lives and the two paths any life might take: staying and leaving, safety and risk. Bennett is too honest to call either path the right one; each costs what the other saves, and against both, in the end, stands the plain fact of mortality that makes every ordinary day matter. Widely regarded as one of the finest English novels of its age, The Old Wives' Tale is Arnold Bennett's enduring masterpiece.
