The Old Wives' Tale

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was born in Hanley, one of the six Staffordshire "Potteries" towns he later fictionalised as the "Five Towns," the son of a pawnbroker turned solicitor; he trained and briefly worked as a solicitor's clerk himself before abandoning law for journalism, editing the women's magazine Woman in London from 1894. Anna of the Five Towns (1902) established him as a serious novelist of provincial industrial life, but The Old Wives' Tale (1908), written while he was living in Paris and steeped in French realist fiction, was recognised immediately as his masterpiece, following two Staffordshire sisters through half a century of ordinary and extraordinary life; the Clayhanger trilogy (1910–1916) consolidated his reputation. Equally prolific as a journalist, playwright, and author of brisk self-improvement books such as How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (1908), he was among the best-paid writers of his generation and a prominent figure in London literary society, close to H. G. Wells and, later, an influential and generous reviewer of younger novelists' work. He died in London at sixty-three, of typhoid fever reportedly contracted after drinking Paris tap water to demonstrate, against local advice, that it was safe.