In the Library
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett, 1908
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 215k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks does the same thing with a German merchant dynasty, watching a family's fortunes quietly rise and decay across four generations, one dinner table at a time.
£1.99
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Middlemarch does the same thing for a whole English town, following its women through the slow compromises of marriage and the quiet erosion of youthful hope.
£1.99
About the book
In a draper's shop on the market square of a smoky Staffordshire town, two sisters stand at the threshold of everything. Constance is placid and dutiful and will stay; Sophia is fierce and beautiful and will run, eloping to Paris with a travelling salesman who abandons her there, leaving her to survive a siege and a lifetime alone. Bennett follows both women from girlhood to the grave, and the miracle of the book is that he refuses to let a single year go small: the shop, the marriage, the boarding house, the slow silting-up of decades, all of it held at full weight. He was moved to write it by a fat, absurd old woman glimpsed in a restaurant, struck by the thought that she had once been young. The whole novel lives in that thought. To read it is to watch time do its patient, terrible work on two ordinary lives and to understand, at last, that there is no such thing as an ordinary life.