The Old Wives' Tale

Constance and Sophia Baines grow up above their parents' draper's shop in Bursley, one of the pottery towns of the English Midlands, in the 1860s. Quiet Constance marries the shop assistant and spends her whole life in the same house and town. Passionate Sophia runs away with a handsome, worthless travelling salesman to Paris, where he abandons her, and she lives through the siege of 1870 and the Commune, building a successful boarding house. The novel follows both sisters from girlhood to old age.

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), who came from the Potteries himself, wrote the novel in 1908 after seeing a fussy old woman in a Paris restaurant and imagining that she too had once been young and beautiful. Its patient, unsentimental picture of time passing through ordinary lives is considered his masterpiece. Compare George Eliot's Middlemarch.