The Old Wives' Tale de Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale

Arnold Bennett

Classics for Your Collection:

goo.gl/U80LCr

---------

We follow the story of the sisters' two-penny lives. They live in a small English provincial town above their father's draper's shop. We see them when they were small girls, grow up to be young women: Constance marrying a local guy (and later inheriting her father's business), while the more spirited Sophia steals money from her aunt and elopes with a playboy traveling businessman to Paris.

She remains childless, abandoned by her husband, but by stroke of luck was able to put up a business and prospered. Constance, on the other hand, stays in their town, has a son, sees her loved ones grow old and die one by one (her parents, friends, her husband). Her son leaves to seek his fortune elsewhere.

In old age the sisters are briefly reunited. They share problems with house helps, their dogs, and Constance's son's apparent neglect of her. Then they, too, die one by one.

This is a masterpiece of realistic writing, Bennett's description of the everyday, humdrum happenings of ordinary 19th century people pulls you inside the book and makes you feel the characters like they're real flesh-and-blood. It's an exciting, "unputdownable reading" frenzy of non-events.

A remarkable example of the old-fashioned way of telling a story, utilizing no attention-getting, sophisticated-sounding modern tricks.

Scroll Up and Get Your Copy

For Timeless Great Classic Books, Visit:

goo. gl/0oisZU

Citește tot Restrânge

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.