The Old Wives' Tale

The Old Wives' Tale is a novel by the English writer Arnold Bennett, first published in January 1908 and set in Bursley, a lightly disguised version of Burslem.

The book covers about sixty-five years, from the 1840s to the beginning of the twentieth century, and it is arranged in four parts: the sisters' adolescence in a house above the shop, with a bedridden father and a mother who holds everything together; Sophia's elopement and her life in Paris, where she runs a boarding house after being left; Constance's marriage, widowhood and old age in the shop; and the reunion of the two women. Bennett's interest is in the length of ordinary lives, and the novel was unusual for taking the whole of two unremarkable ones as its subject rather than a crisis. The detail is domestic and exact, down to the price of things and the arrangement of a shop window, and the Paris sections give the book its contrast between a provincial English town and a French city understood through commerce rather than culture. It is generally regarded as one of Bennett's finest works.