The Old Wives' Tale (Modern Library (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: troublesome authorial attitude
Review: 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.

GRADE: C

Rating:
Summary: absolutely superb
Review: discriminating readers will not be disappointed with this novel. it's a wonderful old-fashioned tale; bennett has a terrific sense of humor about his characters and life. marvelous period detail. i also highly recommend clayhanger.

Rating:
Summary: The Old Wives Tale is Wise
Review: I am largely a reader of non-fiction and I determined I should undertake more fiction so I started with a recommendations list. When I counted the pages in this novel, I thought "Oh, no! I will never complete this book!" I honestly couldn't put it away until I had completed it.

The book focuses on two sisters, Sophia and Constance. These sisters are opposite each other in most ways except the family traditions. Each takes a different path in life. Sophia pursues happiness and Constance seeks the appropriate traditional life - no waves for this girl.

Sophia becomes independent but remains unhappy, it seems. Constance does what is right, but to me seems unhappy as well. Several readers ask if Bennett liked his characters. Seems as if Bennett chose to keep their character's as un-romantic as possible. There are no fairy tale endings in this book.

Despite the gloom and despair I found The Old Wives Tale a compelling read. I wanted happiness to fill their lives but it never seemed to come. The read was inviting and not at all tedious.

Rating:
Summary: The Old Wives Tale is Wise
Review: I am largely a reader of non-fiction and I determined I should undertake more fiction so I started with a recommendations list. When I counted the pages in this novel, I thought "Oh, no! I will never complete this book!" I honestly couldn't put it away until I had completed it.

The book focuses on two sisters, Sophia and Constance. These sisters are opposite each other in most ways except the family traditions. Each takes a different path in life. Sophia pursues happiness and Constance seeks the appropriate traditional life - no waves for this girl.

Sophia becomes independent but remains unhappy, it seems. Constance does what is right, but to me seems unhappy as well. Several readers ask if Bennett liked his characters. Seems as if Bennett chose to keep their character's as un-romantic as possible. There are no fairy tale endings in this book.

Despite the gloom and despair I found The Old Wives Tale a compelling read. I wanted happiness to fill their lives but it never seemed to come. The read was inviting and not at all tedious.

Rating:
Summary: You like it, you really like it!
Review: I'm certainly not the only person in the world who thinks of this book as a masterpiece. The fact that H.G. Wells, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf all praise this book as being so is one of the reasons I picked it up. In spite of that, I really read it without set expectations.

Briefly, to say what has already been said before, The Old Wives Tale is exactly that - a tale of three women who marry in very different circumstances. Mrs. Baines, the mother, is a life who is only briefly touched upon. However, the seperate lives of the two sisters, Sophia and Constance, are the crux of the book. Each life takes its' turn. We are first told about Constance, then about Sophia, and finally, about their reunion. Constance, whose name is not a coincidence, lives a simple provincial life, and Sophia, whose name also matches her persona, chooses romance and adventure. There is only one villain, and yet, he is perhaps the most powerful and chilling of all villains, Time. His grasping, clutching, suffocating presence is ever felt throughout the book, and looms even larger once that final page is turned. In the end, Sophia and Constance each pay the price for their choices, and the true cost of those choices is left for the reader to decide. As unique as we are, we will each believe something different about Sophia and Constance in the end, and that is precisely the point.

To sum up the experience of The Old Wives Tale, a tale of three women living their lives, and their lives changing them (or perhaps not changing them, is that it is the most honest approach to human psychology I have ever read. The lives we read about, Mrs. Baines, Sophia, Constance, and even those who surround them, could be anyone's. In fact, most of us can find someone in this book we could point to and say "that's me". No character, no matter how brief their exit or entrance into this story, is insignificant. Each person gives us a fresh perspective on the human response to events and to, of course, other humans. The three main characters are presented with sheer, unsympathetic, yet respectful honesty. We are not introduced to inhuman, perfect, idealistic souls in this book. Nor are we looking through the eyes of the wicked. Instead, we are searching the souls of ordinary people and in the end, are left with a question about our own existence.

In fact, it should be a large clue to readers when they see that the title of the fourth section is, What Life Is. It is here that something occurred which I totally unexpected, and it left me quite shaken - in fact, desperate. I found that I had been brought from the comfortable vantage point of observing these fictional lives, which are at times inexplicably amusing and heroic, to a sudden uncomfortable sensation that the characters were real and had turned toward me - the reader - begging the question "What of your life? What have you done with it? What have you accomplished?"

That subtle change of vantage point was shocking, and ingenious. Without criticizing his own creation, the author was able to communicate the importance of living our lives to the fullest without telling us how. This fact alone shows great wisdom. Sophia and Constance experience remarkable things, no more remarkable than most people, but remarkable just the same. Each reacts differently because they are different, and each has a different idea about how to find happiness and how to deal with life's disappointments. Both are frequently of the opinion that they could improve someone else's life, yet have not found real satisfaction in their own. Each makes mistakes, and each perform the heroic. The author will on the same page be blunt about their faults and tender with their plight. He tells their story without judgement, and yet in the end, you feel you have read a very wise judgement on the nature of the human race. Here, reader, you will find no prescription for life, but a question that begs a diagnosis. The author makes it starkly clear that the remedy, or whether a remedy is even required, is up to you.

The Old Wives Tale is not a dark story. It is not a comedy. It is not high adventure or mystery. In fact, it is many of these things put together to create something REAL. And it has shaken me to the core.

Rating:
Summary: You like it, you really like it!
Review: It's quite consoling to see the ammount of good reviews TOW'sT has generated, here on Amazon's American website. Looking it up, I thought that US readers wouldn't 'get it'. They might, I thought, be as bad as Southern readers are in England, and say something as sublimely glib as: 'Bennett's dreary tale set in the Industrial North...' (Mistake no. 1: it's set in the Midlands).

It turned out, to my warm surprise, that US readers 'got it' far better than did British readers - most of whom, today, seem to have forgotten that Bennett ever existed, save for being the man D.H. Lawrence (in some ways Bennett's heir, and fellow Midlander) mocked as a 'pig in clover'.

The novel shows Bennett's attempt to live up to his influences - the 19th century French Naturalists. In some ways it succeeds. Bennett has few equals in Britain before or since for capturing the day, drudgery and all, as it passes through his characters. He lacks the ideoological fervour that animates the French, however, which may well account for the occasional bout of tedium in the work. Bennett was, essentially, a self-educated Staffordshire working man (a breed Virginia Woolf wanted scoured from the face of the Earth), which may also account for the height from which he views his characters, which can be just as bad as the more obnoxious breed of London-born and educated novelists, at times. But it also means that his characters convince in a way that not many of his contemporaries did. Bennett knows his characters aren't simply and solely 'provincials' - snobbery's convenient short-hand term for people outside of London - as if further talk of them was in some way unnecessary. They are people, with long, loves and sensations, and with a fundamental sense of decency others seem to have discarded at birth. He brings what the best realist authors do - a sense of walking a mile in a person's shoes, through good and bad, with wry, warm humour.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and Touching
Review: The continuing saga of a mother and her two daughters.Mrs Baines is the middle aged boisterous woman who runs rule of the family business as her invalid husband lies in wait of his demise.The Baines` have two young daughters-Constance ( intelligent and stable)and Sofia (beautiful and flighty).the ideal of the story was to examine how one would perceive "a Mrs Baines" if you were to encounter her on the street or in a cafe.would you see her as an old rude lady?Would you be able to invision the possibility that in her younger days she was as Constance and Sofia are? And ther lies the basis of the story-how does one go from being a beautiful,fun loving girl to a boisterous old lady.Well as the story delves further into their lives we witness everything that happens and therefore shapes their lives.In real life events, whether large or small will determine our next path in life and here we get to see where they end up.
A terrific read for something written in 1908.

Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile
Review: The Old Wives' Tale is not in any way a challenging read, but it is enjoyable and seems to be an accurate reflection of the gradual effects of time on a way of life as embodied in the Baines sisters. Bennett seems especially acute in his observation of the way habit eventually defines personality for both sisters and the grand movement of history only appears sweeping in retrospect.

I am surprised by some of the earlier reviews of this novel. They seem to criticism of Bennett's source of inspiration rather than of the novel itself. Which of us has not seen an individual at some stage of development and been struck by the revelation that he or she was once an infant or teenager or young adult? This does not imply condescension.

Bennett's portraits of Constance and Sophia are largely sympathetic. He does not see either as faultless and in some ways both are pathetic, but his object is to show us the whole range of each of his heroines' lives so that when we find them late in life to be stubborn and incapable of change, we can see the source of their defects without condemnation. Readers need only ask themselves at the end of novel whether he likes the sisters or not to gauge whether Bennett's portraits are sympathetic.

It is hard for me to see how anyone could finish this novel wondering whether Bennett likes these women.