The Old Wives' Tale
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy realist novels and narratives of everyday life
- Readers interested in women's life choices and family fate
- Readers of fiction studying late nineteenth-century English provincial city life
- Literary enthusiasts willing to read slowly and appreciate detail-accumulating narrative
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer strong plot, fast pace and frequent reversals
- Readers impatient with lengthy everyday description
- Readers seeking clear social critique or theoretical analysis
Reading tips
- Read in sections by life stage, and after each stage review the differences in the two sisters' choices.
- Keep a simple character chart recording changes in marriage, family and shop life.
- Read everyday details slowly, noting how the author uses objects and accounts to show the passage of time.
- After finishing, revisit the opening and ending to compare the characters' overall trajectory from girlhood to old age.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
The plot is slow—is it worth persevering?
Can I understand it without background knowledge about England?
Is it suitable as English original reading material?
Comments
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About the author
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist, essayist and playwright. Publicly available information is limited, so his early life and education cannot be described in detail, but his work is clearly recognisable. He often set his writing in the five pottery towns of Staffordshire, his home region, portraying the daily livelihoods and emotional ups and downs of ordinary people in a meticulous, restrained style, and revealing character and circumstance through everyday detail. The collection here holds 45 of his works, including The Old Wives' Tale, Riceyman Steps, Clayhanger and several Five Towns story collections, as well as essays such as The Author's Craft and How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. His writing thus spans fiction and essays on life and the craft of writing, drawing its material from ordinary life with a plain style and close observation.
