老妇谭

The dull thud of a father falling out of bed is where the whole book begins. Above a draper's shop in a small Staffordshire town, old Mr. Baines, paralyzed for years, struggled out of bed and died on the floor. That night his younger daughter Sophia, who was supposed to be watching over him, slipped out to meet a man. She carried the debt for it the rest of her life.

Arnold Bennett was born in the Potteries, the industrial heart of England's Midlands, and he came out of exactly that world. In 1908 he set out to put his hometown into a novel, a family saga running across two generations and two countries, England and France. The book is often named a defining work of Edwardian realism, and critics reach for Balzac when describing it — not because it matches his scale, but because it treats ordinary people with the same seriousness.

The title, The Old Wives' Tale, invites you to expect a book of myths or ghost stories. It is nothing of the sort — a relentlessly realist family novel. There are no heroes here and no adventures, only shopfronts, sitting rooms, ledgers, church services, and neighbors' gossip. Bennett's wager was that if you rendered this kind of life truly enough, and for long enough, it would turn into an epic on its own.

Constance, the elder, is steady and dutiful, the kind of girl who could stand behind the same counter her whole life. Sophia, the younger, is beautiful, headstrong, and thinking of nothing but getting out. The two of them grew up in the same bed, and the night their father died split them apart. One stayed and married Samuel Povey, the shop's honest, rule-bound assistant. The other, ignoring her mother's tears and shouting, ran off to Paris with Gerald Scales, a traveling salesman.

From here the novel splits like a river forking in two. Constance stays with the shop, her son, and a self that never sets foot outside the town. Sophia runs a lodging house in Paris, her own boss, keeping her own books, fending off her own difficult tenants. Both roads lead to old age. One simply hugs the ground; the other loops halfway around the world before coming home.

The story opens in the bedroom above the Baines family's draper's shop. The father, paralyzed for years and bedridden, cantankerous with it, had survived winter after winter on his wife and daughters taking turns to nurse him. That night it was Sophia's turn to sit with him, and instead she slipped out to meet the traveling cloth salesman. By the time she came back, he had fallen out of bed and died. Mr. Critchlow, the chemist next door, arrived and, in his first sentence, pointed the blame straight at her. She had no way to argue it and no way to explain it. She simply carried it from then on.

Sophia left with the man the very next day. Her mother wept until she could barely stand; Constance stood in the doorway and said nothing at all. Once the shop door closed, Sophia would not come back for decades. Bennett writes the parting with remarkable restraint — nothing thrown, nothing cursed, only the mother's hands closing on an empty doorframe. This is where his method for domestic drama shows itself: the deepest cut draws no blood.

Barely settled in Paris, she watched Gerald show his true nature — spendthrift, dissolute, and eventually gone for good. She did not cry her way back home. She kept the lodging house running and took the books into her own hands. Between 1870 and 1871, the Franco-Prussian War and then the Paris Commune tore the city apart in turn; the siege left the streets starving and full of the dead, and the Commune's street fighting broke out just past her block. She lived through the famine and the requisitions behind her own window, and by sheer effort turned a small lodging house into a respectable establishment fit for serious travelers.

Bennett handles this stretch of history deliberately quietly, with none of the noise of a war film — shellfire is just a rumble in the distance, meat prices are chalked on a board, and the unseen dead lie propped against a corner. The real story is a woman abandoned by her husband, raising herself all over again in the middle of chaos. The craft here is in the contrast: outside is grand history, inside is her counting coins and changing sheets. Both happen at once, and neither is allowed to drown out the other.

Back in the small town, life wears you down a different way. Constance married Samuel, had a son, Cyril, and settled into an unremarkable family life. Then Samuel's cousin was caught up in a courtroom scandal that set the whole town talking, and Samuel ran himself ragged shouldering the fallout, until it wore him down and he died before he turned forty. Constance said nothing. She took over the shop, raised the boy, and watched the draper's trade get squeezed a little thinner every year by the new department stores.

The quieter pain is her son Cyril. He grows up wanting to be an artist in London, drifting further away, his letters home getting shorter. Mother and son sit at the same table and swallow half of what they mean to say. This is the most merciless thread in the book — no quarrels, no villain, just time thinning out blood by slow degrees.

The sisters' reunion is the most restrained scene in the whole book. More than thirty years have passed, and there is no dramatic telegram — just a mutual old acquaintance passing through Paris who happens to hear that Sophia is still alive. The news makes its way back that slowly. Sophia sells her lodging house, comes home to the town with a single suitcase, puts on an old apron her sister wore as a young woman, and takes up housework again. Two old women cook, bicker, and sleep in the same kitchen.

On her way home, Sophia takes a detour to see her ex-husband one last time. Gerald is destitute and dying — the dashing man who once talked her into eloping has shrunk to a thin shape in a bed. By the time she arrives, his eyes are already closed, and there is no formal goodbye to be had. The scene is written without mercy: the price of a young woman's impulse comes due again at fifty.

The ending gives two consecutive chapters to Sophia's death and then Constance's. There are no last words, no dramatic farewell, just a woman who does not wake up one ordinary morning. The manner of dying is so plain it borders on disrespect — indistinguishable from sleep. In the final pages Bennett folds in the town's petty squabble over a municipal merger, council business, maps, boundaries, weaving a funeral and civic news into the same chapter.

The move looks cold-blooded, and it lands with unusual force. Setting death inside the most ordinary routine is exactly what reveals its true weight — it is not drama, it is a page of the calendar turning over. Bennett uses this near-rude calm to push the reader toward the last line: what, in the end, is life? He does not answer the question, and he does not need to.

Bennett has been underrated for far too long. Written in 1908, this book has earned classic status by any modern measure. It does something few novels of its time attempted: it spends a straight six hundred pages following two entirely unremarkable women from girlhood to the grave, with no tearjerking, no twist, only a scale that weighs out the days. That method stretched what a novel could hold — it turns out the least dramatic life imaginable can still be a complete epic.

More interesting still is the mirroring between the sisters. One stays, one leaves, and they end up worn into nearly the same shape by time regardless. This is not an argument against risk, and it is not mockery of staying put. What Bennett is saying is that the choice itself guarantees nothing — what carries you through is the stubbornness to keep on living, whichever road you took. Set against today's stories about women's lives, that judgment still holds with uncomfortable force.

Members only

The first time I read the pages where Samuel dies, I expected the author to give him one tidy summing-up line from a sickbed. He doesn't. A man simply collapses on the rug at the foot of the draper's shop stairs on an ordinary afternoon, and his family calls the police. That's all. That honesty carries more weight than any tearjerker could.

A companion guide can tell you the fate of the two sisters. It cannot show you how Bennett writes fate. He shows Sophia's fingers trembling as she counts coins on a siege day, the sentences in Cyril's letters home getting shorter and shorter, the clumsy trace of care underneath Sonny Critchlow's sharp tongue — these are matters of texture, and any summary loses them. Most of all there is the long, patient rhythm, almost slow enough to make you forget to turn the page: reading it, you slow down, slow enough to hear a carriage passing in the street below. Only the novel itself gives you that sound.