The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett (RB232)

Circa 1948: Hardcover / Very Good Condition / Illustrated frontispiece

Original black cloth with gilt titles on the cover and spine and original pictorial dust jacket. 544 very clean and bright pages. Covers slightly rubbed with time. Dust jacket is slightly rubbed with time and chipped along the edges consistent with age but remains intact. (RB232)

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There are few more moving accounts of the effects of time, the passage of history and the slow encroachment of age than this remarkable, epic novel' Guardian Discover this powerful novel about the ordinary lives of the Baines sisters. The perfect next step for fans of Little Women. In The Old Wives' Tale , Arnold Bennett tells the story of two such old wives, sisters Constance and Sophia, from youth, through marriage, heartbreak, triumphs and disasters, to old age. In doing so, he reveals with careful compassion the intense inner lives that throb beneath every seemingly insignificant exterior. [Google Books]

The Old Wives' Tale celebrates the romance of even the most ordinary lives in the course of tracing the passage of time over three generations. It tells the story of the two Baines sisters, placid stay-at-home Constance and rebellious Sophia, from their girlhood to their last days. They move from the family drapery shop in provincial Bursley during the repressive mid-Victorian period to old age in the modern era of mass marketing and the internal combustion engine. The setting ranges from the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Bursley to a Paris bro-thel, the action from the controlled domestic routine of the Baines household to wife murder and the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. [Google Books]