Arnold Bennett was born in Hanley, one of the Staffordshire Potteries towns in which he set much of his fiction. Some of the many novels he published from the 1890s until his death do move outside the Potteries. Riceyman Steps, for example, is set in Clerkenwell, London and scrutinizes, with cruelly clinical detachment, the life of the miserly Henry Earlforward, who inherits a secondhand bookshop and enters, in middle age, upon the courtship of a widow who has moved into a nearby shop. However, despite the fact that Bennett himself became very much a metropolitan man, at home amid the great and good of literary and artistic London, his most characteristic novels remain those in which he reconstructed the provincial world of his boyhood. 

Of these, the most rewarding for the reader is probably The Old Wives’ Tale, which focuses on two sisters, the daughters of a prosperous draper in the Five Towns, who lead contrasting but equally difficult lives. 

Constance, as her name suggests, is the stay-at-home sister who marries her father’s apprentice and settles into a life of conventional motherhood and routine domesticity. 

Sophia, less easily satisfied with what the Potteries have to offer, elopes to Paris with a caddish charmer named Gerald Scales. There Scales deserts her and she is forced to endure the hardships of the siege that the city endures after the Franco-Prussian War and to struggle to find a new place in the world. 

The novel follows the sisters throughout their lives until the twists and turns of fate return both of them, as old women, to their childhood home. 

Bennett revisited the Potteries in an even more ambitious sequence of novels beginning with Clayhanger, in 1910, which charts the life and career of its eponymous hero Edwin Clayhanger, but The Old Wives’ Tale is as powerful and moving a piece of social realism as he ever wrote.

 

Anna of the Five Towns; Clayhanger; Riceyman Steps Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; >> D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; >> H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica.