The Old Wives' Tale de Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale

Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, into old age. It is generally regarded as one of Bennett's finest works. It covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Burslem and Paris. Bennett was initially inspired to write the book by a chance encounter in a Parisian restaurant. H. G. Wells described The Old Wives' Tale as "by far the finest long novel written in English and in the English fashion." He was, of course, speaking for his own generation, and a hundred years later there is no doubt that The Old Wives' Tale is a superby novel of its kind, and it is still as readable and enjoyable as ever. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Old Wives' Tale #87 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

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Notă biografică

Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867 - 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as the theatre, journalism, propaganda and films. In 1889 Bennett won a literary competition run by the magazine Tit-Bits and was encouraged to take up journalism full-time. In 1894 he became assistant editor of the magazine Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial that was bought by the syndicate for 75 pounds (equivalent to £10,000 in 2016). He then wrote another. This became The Grand Babylon Hotel. Just over four years later his novel A Man from the North was published to critical acclaim and he became editor of the magazine. In 1900 Bennett gave up the editorship of Woman and dedicated himself to writing full-time. However, he continued to write for newspapers and magazines while finding success in his career as a novelist. In 1926, at the suggestion of Lord Beaverbrook, he began writing an influential weekly article on books for the London newspaper the Evening Standard. One of Bennett's most popular non-fiction works was the self-help book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. His diaries have yet to be published in full, but extracts from them have often been quoted in the British press.