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Title: The Old Wives' Tale (The World's Classics) by Arnold Bennett, Margaret Harris ISBN: 0-19-282966-1 Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Worthwhile
Comment: The Old Wives' Tale is not in any way a challenging read, but it is enjoyable and seems to be an accurate reflection of the gradual effects of time on a way of life as embodied in the Baines sisters. Bennett seems especially acute in his observation of the way habit eventually defines personality for both sisters and the grand movement of history only appears sweeping in retrospect.

I am surprised by some of the earlier reviews of this novel. They seem to criticism of Bennett's source of inspiration rather than of the novel itself. Which of us has not seen an individual at some stage of development and been struck by the revelation that he or she was once an infant or teenager or young adult? This does not imply condescension.

Bennett's portraits of Constance and Sophia are largely sympathetic. He does not see either as faultless and in some ways both are pathetic, but his object is to show us the whole range of each of his heroines' lives so that when we find them late in life to be stubborn and incapable of change, we can see the source of their defects without condemnation. Readers need only ask themselves at the end of novel whether he likes the sisters or not to gauge whether Bennett's portraits are sympathetic.

It is hard for me to see how anyone could finish this novel wondering whether Bennett likes these women.

Rating: 5
Summary: Engrossing, intense read - surprisingly moving.
Comment: This is the second Bennett book I read set in the Five Towns area (the first was Anna of the Five Towns). This book is longer and more complex but carries on the direct form of writing that seems to characterize Bennett's work. The direct, simple form of his prose draws the reader in and involves her in the experiences in these two women's lives. The ending, though expected, is still tragic and leaves the reader to reconsider what life is and just how it affected the sisters. I wish I could find more books by him about the five towns. I read voraciously and am always surprised by how moved I have been by Mr. Bennett's work. Readers will not be disappointed if they give him a chance.

Rating: 5
Summary: You like it, you really like it!
Comment: It's quite consoling to see the ammount of good reviews TOW'sT has generated, here on Amazon's American website. Looking it up, I thought that US readers wouldn't 'get it'. They might, I thought, be as bad as Southern readers are in England, and say something as sublimely glib as: 'Bennett's dreary tale set in the Industrial North...' (Mistake no. 1: it's set in the Midlands).

It turned out, to my warm surprise, that US readers 'got it' far better than did British readers - most of whom, today, seem to have forgotten that Bennett ever existed, save for being the man D.H. Lawrence (in some ways Bennett's heir, and fellow Midlander) mocked as a 'pig in clover'.

The novel shows Bennett's attempt to live up to his influences - the 19th century French Naturalists. In some ways it succeeds. Bennett has few equals in Britain before or since for capturing the day, drudgery and all, as it passes through his characters. He lacks the ideoological fervour that animates the French, however, which may well account for the occasional bout of tedium in the work. Bennett was, essentially, a self-educated Staffordshire working man (a breed Virginia Woolf wanted scoured from the face of the Earth), which may also account for the height from which he views his characters, which can be just as bad as the more obnoxious breed of London-born and educated novelists, at times. But it also means that his characters convince in a way that not many of his contemporaries did. Bennett knows his characters aren't simply and solely 'provincials' - snobbery's convenient short-hand term for people outside of London - as if further talk of them was in some way unnecessary. They are people, with long, loves and sensations, and with a fundamental sense of decency others seem to have discarded at birth. He brings what the best realist authors do - a sense of walking a mile in a person's shoes, through good and bad, with wry, warm humour.