The Old Wives' Tale (1908) by: Arnold Bennett. ( NOVEL )

Product Information

Lyttelton, George; Rupert Hart-Davis (1979). Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.). The Lyttelton–Hart-Davis Letters, Volume 2. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0-7195-3673-1. The Lion's Share; The Baby's Bath; The Silent Brothers; The Nineteenth Hat; Vera's First Christmas Adventure; The Murder of the Mandarin; Vera’s Second Christmas Adventure; The Burglary; The News of the Engagement; Beginning the New Year; From one Generation to Another; The Death of Simon Fuge; In a New Bottle In 1912 Bennett resettled permanently in England. His enormously popular play, The Great Adventure (1913), was based on his own novel Buried Alive (1908). During World War I he was active as a political propagandist as well as keeping up his other writing. The last Clayhanger novel, These Twain, appeared in 1916. Its protagonist, Priam Farll, is a 50-year old bachelor and supremely eminent British artist who is widely travelled and has lived many years in Europe. His is relentlessly courted by journalists and art connoisseurs. However, Priam is pathologically shy. The DSM-5 will call his extraordinary shyness social anxiety. We were told, ‘To call the world’s attention visually to the fact of his own existence was anguish to him. But in a letter he could be absolutely brazen. Give him a pen and he was fearless.’ On a day-to-day basis, Priam is dependent on his valet (Henry Fleet) who travels the world with him and acts as his social conduit. In awkward situations, Priam has only one response, which is to flee. On one of those ‘flights’ to safety, Priam landed in London where his valet, unfortunately, died suddenly. The attending doctor mistook Henry for Priam. Brilliant! ‘And all the sensitive timidity in Priam Farll’s character seized swiftly at the mad chance of escape from any kind of public appearance as Priam Farll. Why should he not let it be supposed that he, and not Henry Leek, had expired suddenly in Selwood Terrace at 5 a.m. He would be free, utterly free!’

Of course, this'll make him more popular than ever,'said another. 'We've never had a man to touch him for that.'In 1921 Bennett and his wife legally separated. They had been drifting apart for some years and Marguerite had taken up with Pierre Legros, a young French lecturer. [67] Bennett sold Comarques and lived in London for the rest of his life, first in a flat near Bond Street in the West End, on which he had taken a lease during the war. [68] For much of the 1920s he was widely known to be the highest-paid literary journalist in England, contributing a weekly column to Beaverbrook's Evening Standard under the title 'Books and Persons'; according to Frank Swinnerton these articles were "extraordinarily successful and influential ... and made a number of new reputations". [69] [n 8] By the end of his career, Bennett had contributed to more than 100 newspapers, magazines and other publications. [71] He continued to write novels and plays as assiduously as before the war. [3] [41] Barker, Dudley (1966). Writer by Trade: A Portrait of Arnold Bennett. New York: Atheneum. OCLC 881792531. Clayhanger ATV 1976 – 26-part adaptation by Douglas Livingstone of Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways and These Twain, with Peter McEnery, Denis Quilley, Janet Suzman and Harry Andrews The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plan of the ecliptic - that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore our history - had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer." The columns for The Evening Standard are collected in Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years – "Books and Persons" 1926–1931, published in 1974. [70]

Over 10 hours and almost 40 years, we follow them, their descendants, and the inhabitants of Bursley and the Five Towns, as individuals rise, fall, flourish, age, and see the world around them become unrecognisable, transformed by new technology. Fortunes are lost, hearts broken, empires built and compromises made. The cast included Dion Boucicault, W. Graham Brown, Dennis Eadie, Basil Hallam, Kate Serjeantson and Marie Tempest. [53] Sitwell recorded that Bennett's practice of anonymous philanthropy was continued by the latter's protégé Hugh Walpole. [75]Quite how Bennett got away without being understood there is beyond me. Sophia Baines has by this point eloped to Paris with a travelling salesman, abandoning the stultifying prospect of a life spent assisting her older sister Constance in the family drapery shop in Bursley, one of the fictional “Five Towns” of the Staffordshire potteries. Sophia’s husband Gerald, however, insists on travelling straight to Auxerre to watch the execution of a murderer, whose severed head is supposed to fall neatly into that oh-so-symbolic “large open box”. Carey, John (1992). The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber. OCLC 600877390. Selections from the complete journals, edited and selected by Frank Swinnerton, 1954 (revised edition, with additions, 1971) There is a two-metre-high bronze statue of Bennett [153] outside The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, unveiled on 27 May 2017 during the events marking the 150th anniversary of his birth. [154] Archives [ edit ] BFI Screenonline: Piccadilly (1929)". www.screenonline.org.uk. Archived from the original on 5 December 2015 . Retrieved 22 February 2021.

Sources: Arnold Bennett by Frank Swinnerton; Arnold Bennett by Margaret Drabble. [2] Adaptations by others [ edit ] Cinema [ edit ] Hepburn, James (1970). Letters of Arnold Bennett. Vol.III. London and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192121855.

Retailers:

Don Juan de Maraña libretto for four-act opera, based on his 1923 play, music by Goossens. Libretto completed in 1931; opera premiered ( Covent Garden) 1937 Bennett, Arnold (1954). Frank Swinnerton (ed.). The Journals of Arnold Bennett. London: Penguin. OCLC 476462467. Bennett, Arnold (1933). Newman Flower (ed.). The Journals of Arnold Bennett: Volume III, 1921–1928. London: Cassels. OCLC 940296443. This is the side to Bennett’s writing that I find curiously uplifting, despite the apparent fatalism of the plot: the tenderness with which he recognises that our families, upbringing and environment imprint us for life. We can rage against it, like Sophia (or Bennett himself, who left the Potteries as a young man and never lived there again), but it will always be visible in the intimate tiny details he catalogues, like this moment, when he describes Sophia recoiling from the execution above: In 2017 the society instituted an annual Arnold Bennett Prize as part of author's 150th anniversary celebrations, to be awarded to an author who was born, lives or works in North Staffordshire and has published a book in the relevant year, or to the author of a book which features the region. In 2017 John Lancaster won the award for his poetry collection Potters: A Division of Labour. Subsequent winners have been Jan Edwards for her novel Winter Downs (2018), Charlotte Higgins for Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths (2019) and Lisa Blower for her story collection It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's (2020). [146] The prize was not awarded in 2021 because of the Covid-19 situation, but in 2022 it was won by John Pye, a former detective inspector turned crime writer, for his novel Where the Silent Screams Are Loudest. [147] The prize in 2023 went to Philip Nanney Williams for his book Adams: Britain's Oldest Potting Dynasty. [4] Plaques and statuary [ edit ]

It is not the plot that is the book’s attraction. On this I will spend just a few words. The central character, Priam Farll, is a renown English painter. He has achieved both money and fame, but he is shy, excessively shy! So he employs a valet--Henry Leek. Henry is Priam’s face to the outside world. Both are fifty. Both are bachelors, but Henry has a past of which he does not speak. In 1905 Bennett became engaged to Eleanor Green, a member of an eccentric and capricious American family living in Paris, but at the last moment, after the wedding invitations had been sent out, she broke off the engagement and almost immediately married a fellow American. [37] Drabble comments that Bennett was well rid of her, but it was a painful episode in his life. [38] In early 1907 he met Marguerite Soulié (1874–1960), who soon became first a friend and then a lover. [39] In May he was taken ill with a severe gastric complaint, and Marguerite moved into his flat to look after him. They became still closer, and in July 1907, shortly after his fortieth birthday, they were married at the Mairie of the 9th arrondissement. [40] The marriage was childless. [41] Early in 1908 the couple moved from the rue d'Aumale to the Villa des Néfliers in Fontainebleau-Avon, about 40 miles (64km) south-east of Paris. [42] [n 4]

1911

Bennett was born in Hanley in the Potteries, the son of a solicitor. In 1888 he went to London as a solicitor's clerk, a profession he soon abandoned for the more congenial job of journalist. He became assistant editor (1893), then editor (1896–1900), of the journal Woman and also experimented with narrative prose; The Grand Babylon Hotel and Anna of the Five Towns, novels widely different in their styles, were published almost simultaneously in 1902. He could neither talk well nor read well... He could only express himself at the end of a brush... In minor ways he may have been, upon occasion, a fool. But he was never a fool on canvass... Why expect more of him? One does not expect a wire-walker to play fine billiards." Shapcott, John (2017). Arnold Bennett Companion, Vol. II. Leek, Staffs: Churnet Valley Books. ISBN 978-1-904546-91-7