Arnold Bennett was in a restaurant in Paris one day and a haggard old woman, apparently a maniac, got into a tussle with a beautiful young waitress.  Bennett had an epiphany and realized that the old woman too must have once been young and pretty and full of life.  He decided there and then to write a novel that would chart the arc of such a woman's life.  The result is this naturalist classic, by one of the last truly 19th Century writers.  But it begs the question: is an author a humanist or a condescending phallus when it comes as a revelation to him that old unattractive women may have lead full and interesting lives?

In the event, Bennett wrote a book about two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, daughters of a shopkeeper in the Five Towns where he set all of his novels.  Sophia, who leads the more exciting life, runs off to Paris with a louse of a husband, but Constance, modeled on the old woman, stays in Bursley and marries the assistant in the shop.  Late in life, the two women are reunited, dying within a brief time of one another.  The version of the book that I read has an Introduction by JB Priestley, wherein he says:

    If we think first of the two sisters as young girls, then this tale is grim, a tragedy; but if we think
    first (as Bennett did) of the apparently dull old women and then realise that they marched through
    this epic, then the tale is a romance.

Now, I'm not the most sensitive flower in the garden, but I just find that totally offensive.  It seems to me that it is a fair representation of the attitude of the intelligentsia throughout history:  pity the poor hoi polloi, what dull lives they must lead.  But it defies logic to assume that the great mass of mankind leads lives of desparation and disappointment.  It would seem that the contrary is probably true; most folks probably lead perfectly satisfactory lives, even if they are just working 9 to 5 and then going bowling or watching wrestling and NASCAR on TV.  We may not all pursue the same highbrow interests as the authors and artists of the world, but there's no reason to assume that we're any less happy with our lives.  And even the fat old chick pumping coins into a video poker machine may be as happy as a pig in slop.

I had honestly never even heard of Bennett until there was a piece on him in the New York Times Book Review a couple of years ago.  I've since made an effort to read his stuff and I find much to like in his work.  But the attitude that gave birth to this book infects his narrative voice and I found it pretty annoying.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (C) Orrin C. Judd

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Arnold Bennett Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Arnold Bennett
    -Arnold Bennet Society
    -TRIBUTE SITE: The Arnold Bennett Blog
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett (THe Modern Novel)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Arnold Bennett (IMDB)
    -AUTHOR PAGE: Arnold Bennett (Penguin Random House)
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett - Son of Stoke-on-Trent (The Potteries)
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett (American Literature)
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett (Encyclopedia.com)
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett (Spartacus Educational)
    -ENTRY: Arnold Bennett (Oxford Reference)
    -COLLECTION: Arnold Bennett Collection (Staffordshire University)
    -ETEXT INDEX: Arnold Bennett (Project Gutenberg)
    -COLLECTION: Arnold Bennett Papers (Keele University)
    -AUDIO INDEX: Arnold Bennett (LibriVox)
    -ESSAY: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time (Farnham, Street)
    -AUDIO: Murder! by Arnold Bennett - 1927 (Classic Detective Stories, 12 October 2024)
    -ETEXT: Murder!
    -ESSAY: Is the Novel Decaying? (Arnold Bennett, 28th of March, 1923, Cassell’s Weekly)
    -PODCAST 107: Arnold Bennett - Riceyman Steps (Back-Listed, December 09, 2019)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Classics Club Spin Delivers Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (Booker Talk, December 11, 2022)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Arnold Bennett (eNotes)
    -ESSAY: Mr. Bennett ands Mrs. Brown (Virginia Woolf, 1923)
    -ESSAY: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (Aleksandar Stevic, Yale Modernism Lab)
    -ESSAY: Omelette Arnold Bennett – the making of a masterpiece (Neil Sowerberry, 9/10/24)
    -ESSAY/RECIPE: Easy Omelette Arnold Bennett (Delia Online)
    -ESSAY: A Little History of Omelette Arnold Bennett (Good Food Ireland, April 2021)
    -BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) (Frank Swinnerton, Our Civilization)
    -ESSAY: Who's Afraid of Arnold Bennett? (Wendy Lesser, September 28, 1997, NY Times Book Review)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett: poet of the Potteries: His output includes wonderfully bold characters and transforms the sullen Stoke landscape – 150 years after his birth, it’s time his reputation was restored (Charlotte Higgins, 20 May 2017, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett: poet of The Potteries (Senior Times, September 29, 2022)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett: The Edwardian David Bowie? (Samira Ahmed, 23 June 2014, BBC)
    -ESSAY: Five Fascinating Facts about Arnold Bennett (Interesting Literature)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennet Snubbed Literary Society (Roger Lewis, 5/19/22, Daily Mail)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett (Susannah Fullerton)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett and Late-Victorian "Woman" (Clotilde De Stasio, Spring 1995, Victorian Periodicals Review)
    -ESSAY: Local Heroes: Arnold Bennett (BBC, 04/08/2009)
    -ESSAY: How to make the perfect omelette Arnold Bennett: Do you use smoked haddock or another fish? Hollandaise, bechamel, double cream – or all three? And which other elaborate breakfasts are worth getting up an hour early to make? (Felicity Cloake, 4 Jun 2015, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett should be remembered for more than an omelette: It’s time to rescue one of England’s most successful novelists from the dish that hijacked his name (Simon Heffer, 09 July 2022, The Telegraph)
    -ESSAY: Our Women: Chapters on the Sex Discord by Arnold Bennett (StuckinaBook, May 22, 2017)
    -ESSAY: History and the Everyday in Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale (Ryan John Edwards, 2020, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920)
    -ESSAY: Remythologizing Arnold Bennett (Gloria G. Fromm, Autumn 1982, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Bennett at the Ministry of Information: ‘The most marvellous, disconcerting and romantic thing that ever happened to me’: Arnold Bennett at the Ministry of Information, May-November, 1918. (George Simmers, A paper given at the conference of the Arnold Bennett Society, June 2016.
    -ESSAY: Between Two Worlds: The In-between Aesthetics of Arnold Bennett in Anna of the Five Towns (Yeo Sun Park, 30 June 2022, Literary Imaginatio)
    -ESSAY: Who's afraid of Arnold Bennett? (Simon Heffer, 12 January 2016, The Telegraph)
    -BOOK LIST: The Old Wive’s Tale by Arnold Bennett (Modern Library: 100 Best Novels)
    -ARCHIVES: Arnold Bennett (Internet Archive)
    -REVIEW: of The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett (Charlotte Jones, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW: of The Old Wives' Tale (Sathnam Sanghera, Independent)
    -REVIEW: of The Old Wives’ Tale (William Whyte, Church Times)
    -REVIEW: of Arnold Bennett’s A Man from the North (Vulpes Libris)
    -REVIEW: of Norman Flower (ed.), The Journals of Arnold Bennett (Derek Parker, Slightly Foxed)
    -REVIEW: of Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett (1910) (Reading 1900-1950)
    -REVIEW: of Arnold Bennett, Imperial Palace (Kate MacDonald)
    -REVIEW: of Arnold Bennett A Biography. By Margaret Drabble (Lawrence Graver, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon by Patrick Donovan: Arnold Bennett’s success made him loathed by other writers (A.N. Wilson, 16 April 2022, The Spectator)
    -REVIEW: of Arnold Bennett (Margaret Drabble, TLS)

Book-related and General Links:
    -etext: The Grand Babylon Hotel  Arnold Bennett  (1902)
    -Arnold Bennett
    -Arnold Bennett - Son of Stoke-on-Trent
    -ESSAY: Bennett & Gissing (Frank Kermode, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Writer by Trade: A Portrait of Arnold Bennett by Dudley Barker (Christopher Ricks, NY Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Who's Afraid of Arnold Bennett? (Wendy Lesser, NY Times Book Review)