“In the autumn of 1903, when Bennett used to dine frequently in a Paris restaurant, it happened that a fat old woman came in who aroused almost universal merriment by her eccentric behaviour. The novelist reflected: ‘This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heart-rending novel out of a woman such as she.’ The idea then occurred to him of writing the book which afterwards became The Old Wives’ Tale, and in order to go one better than Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Une Vie’ he determined to make it the life-history of two women instead of one. Constance, the more ordinary sister, was the original heroine; Sophia, the more independent and attractive one, was created ‘out of bravado.’ The project occupied Bennett’s mind for some years, during which he produced five or six novels of smaller scope, but in the autumn of 1907 he began to write The Old Wives’ Tale and finished it in July, 1908. It was published the same autumn and though its immediate reception was not encouraging, before the winter was over it was recognised both in England and America as a work of genius. The novelist’s reputation was upheld, if not increased, by the publication of Clayhanger in 1910, and in June, 1911, the most conservative of American critical authorities, the New York Evening Post, could pronounce judgment in these terms:
“‘Mr. Bennett’s Bursley is not merely one single stupid English provincial town. His Baineses and Clayhangers are not simply average middle class provincials foredoomed to humdrum and the drab shadows of experience. His Bursley is every provincial town, his Baineses are all townspeople whatsoever under the sun. He professes nothing of the kind; but with quiet smiling patience, with a multitude of impalpable touches, clothes his scene and its humble figures in an atmosphere of pity and understanding. These little people, he seems to say, are as important to themselves as you are to yourself, or as I am to myself. Their strength and weakness are ours; their lives, like ours, are rounded with a sleep. And because they stand in their fashion for all human character and experience, there is even a sort of beauty in them if you will but look for it.’”
Books
by Arnold Bennett
Novels:
A MAN FROM THE NORTH
THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
THE GATES OF WRATH