The Old Wives' Tale

The Old Wives' Tale, considered to be one of Bennett's finest works, begins in the 1860s, in the industrial "Five Towns" of the English Midlands, where he set many of his partially autobiographical stories. The novel follows the prosperous Baines family, who live above the successful clothing shop they own in the town of Bursley (based on Burslem, in Staffordshire). Even when the two Baines daughters were still young, their characters are already formed. Sophia has "youth, beauty, and rank in her favour," while Constance is "foolishly good-natured," with benevolence that is "eternally rising up and overpowering her reason." Their paths diverge quickly. While still in her teens, the headstrong Sophia elopes with a traveling salesman, leaving England's provinces for Paris. Constance, who later marries the head employee at the store, hardly ever leaves their town-or even the square where their shop is located. As the novelist J. B. Priestley observed, this gently ironic and sprawling novel sets its "two suffering heroines" against "three conquering heroes, Time, Mutability, and Death." Readers who love sweeping family sagas and richly drawn characters will be captivated by this tale of two sisters and the very different paths their lives take. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)