Arnold Bennett

Born Enoch Arnold Bennett on May 27, 1867, in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, the eldest of six children of a solicitor of mixed fortunes and his Wesleyan wife Sarah Ann, he was groomed for the law. He left school at sixteen to work, unpaid, in his father's office, took up Pitman's shorthand, and on the strength of that secured a clerkship in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1889, leaving his native county and never returning to live there. He moved through journalism into editing a women's magazine, then turned full author in 1900. A long devotion to French letters drew him to Paris in 1903, where he lived for a decade, married the Frenchwoman Marguerite Soulié in 1907, and found that the relaxed milieu eased a debilitating stammer and a paralysing shyness with women. The Old Wives' Tale (1908), tracing the divergent lives of two sisters from a Bursley draper's shop into very different ends in Paris and the Five Towns, sold widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Clayhanger followed in 1910, the first of a trilogy about a Potteries printer's boy and the woman he loves across forty years. He completed thirty-four novels, seven volumes of stories, thirteen plays, and a journal of more than a million words. Virginia Woolf, in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, used him as the type of the outdated materialist novelist. He was the most financially successful British author of his day. Returning from France in 1931, he insisted on drinking a glass of Paris tap water to prove it safe and contracted typhoid. He died in London on March 27, 1931, at sixty-three.

In the autumn of 1903, dining in a restaurant on the Rue de Clichy in Paris, Bennett watched a fat, ugly, grotesque old woman come in to dine and thought: she was once young and slim, maybe even beautiful. The thought would not leave him. It became the seed of The Old Wives' Tale.