the Five Towns, and although the portrayal is still grim, Anna’s life has tragic beauty. Anna rebels against the ties of home, but she also has some love for her roots there, in the person of Willie Price.

The Old Wives’ Tale

Between Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett wrote eleven minor novels, some of which were serious and some not, but each taught him something that contributed to the greatness of The Old Wives’ Tale. Several of them were light comedies, and in writing these Bennett developed the assured comic touch that marks even his serious novels. Three of them were Five Towns novels about female characters from various segments of Bursley society; in these he developed those skills in characterizing women that were so admired in his finest novels. These skills were honed during his time in France, where Bennett learned a great deal about the literary presentation of sex. During these years, Bennett said, he learned more about life than he had ever known before.

When Bennett was ready to write his masterpiece, The Old Wives’ Tale, he had reached full artistic maturity and was at the height of his literary power. He had published one critically acclaimed novel and several others that had allowed him to improve his characterization, especially of women, to temper his realism with humor, and to perfect his themes in various plots. His dislike of Burslem’s grime and provincialism had been balanced by compassion for the town’s inhabitants and awareness of what beauty and aspiration could be found there. His personal involvement in the town had been modified by his experiences in London and Paris, so that he could be objective about the sources of his material. This balance of technique and emotion is reflected in the structure of The Old Wives’ Tale. The novel counterpoints the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, the first of whom stays in Bursley while the second leaves but later returns. Their stories parallel not only each other but also those of preceding and succeeding generations. In fact, the first section of the book is subtitled “Mrs. Baines” (Constance and Sophia’s mother).

In section one, The Old Wives’ Tale takes up in midcareer one generation’s old wife, with a husband so ill that the wife is running his draper’s business and rearing two young daughters. As the girls grow up, Mrs. Baines finds them increasingly hard to handle. During a town festival in which an elephant has to be executed for killing a spectator, Mr. Baines dies. Shortly afterward, Sophia elopes with Gerald Scales, a traveling salesman, and Constance marries Samuel Povey, the former shop assistant, whom Mrs. Baines considers “beneath” her. When Samuel and Constance take over the business, introducing progressive marketing methods, Mrs. Baines retires to live with her elder sister and dies soon thereafter. The story of Mrs. Baines, then, is the end of the life of a woman who “was young and slim once,” although she is not depicted so and that part of her life is understood only by later comparison with the stories of her daughters.

The cycle of Mrs. Baines continues with Constance, who represents the person who stays in Bursley, held by the roots of the past. As Mrs. Baines’s successor, Constance marries a husband whose aspiration is to improve, not to leave, Bursley, and they run the business with a combination of youthful progressiveness and family tradition. Constance and Samuel have a son, Cyril. After a scandal in which Samuel’s cousin is executed for murdering his alcoholic wife, Samuel dies. Constance continues the business for a while, unresponsive to further progressive business practices, and spoils her son until he becomes hard for her to manage. She is finally forced to retire from business by changes in the business structure of Bursley, and Cyril escapes from her and Bursley to London to study art. As a result, Constance comes to depend emotionally on Cyril’s cousin, Dick.

Sophia, the rebel against Bursley, finds a soul mother in the schoolteacher who introduces her to a world of wider intellectual aspiration. In her eagerness to experience more than Bursley offers, however, she elopes with Gerald, a salesman, who represents sophistication and romance to her. They go to France, where they squander their money and slip into mutual disillusionment and recrimination. After observing the public execution of the murderer of a courtesan, Sophia becomes ill, and Gerald abandons her. She eventually acquires a boardinghouse in Paris, where she supports several dependents and survives the Siege of Paris through single-minded hoarding and hard work. She becomes a reclusive fixture on her street, much like Constance on her square in Bursley. When she becomes ill and the business becomes hard for her to manage, she sells it and returns to Bursley to grow old and die.

Each daughter’s life recapitulates Mrs. Baines’s life in certain respects. Each marries, loses a husband, succors children or other dependents, runs a business, gradually loses control over her life (the change marked in each case by a symbolic execution), loses health and strength, and retires to die as a burdensome old woman like the one Bennett saw in the Paris restaurant. Further, although they are not women, the two Povey young men, Cyril and his cousin Dick, recapitulate the early years of Sophia and Constance: Cyril, the rebel who leaves Bursley but does not succeed; and Dick, the stay-at-home progressive idealist. At the end, Dick is engaged to marry a slim, young counterpart to Constance, who will no doubt carry on the cycle.

The thematic repetitions found in The Old Wives’ Tale are not so obvious as the preceding discussion may make them appear, of course; variations of individual character allow the reader a sense of more difference than similarity. The variations also mark a further step in Bennett’s use of his themes. Constance and Sophia are not so warped by Bursley as is Anna in Anna of the Five Towns; in fact, Sophia, who escapes, is warped more than Constance, who stays. Both derive strength from their roots, and while neither can be said to escape or to achieve happiness or grace in living, both transcend Bursley more successfully than do other townspeople. The theme of their decrepitude in old age is a separate one, also used in some of Bennett’s other novels, but not related to the escape and success themes. The Baineses are grouped in other Five Towns stories with those who succeed on Bursley’s terms. Beginning in 1906 in Whom God Hath Joined, in the collection of short stories The Matador of the Five Towns (1912), and in The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett placed a growing emphasis on those members of Burslem society who have some education, culture, and sophistication. Perhaps Bennett had been reassured by his personal success that his childhood in Burslem could be accepted.

Clayhanger

Whether or not it is true that Bennett had come to accept his past, it is certainly true that his next serious book, Clayhanger, was his most nearly autobiographical. After the completion of the trilogy of which Clayhanger was the first volume, Bennett turned from the Five Towns to London as the setting for his novels. The Clayhanger trilogy is the story of a man who at first is defeated in his desire to escape Bursley. Having been defeated, however, he learns from his soul father to rise above Bursley’s philistinism. Over the years, he breaks one after another of his bonds to Bursley until he has succeeded in escaping intellectually, and, eventually, he completely abandons the Five Towns.

Much of this story occurs in the third volume of the trilogy, These Twain. Clayhanger itself is the story of the generational conflict between Edwin Clayhanger and his father, Darius. The conflict is similar to the one between Anna and her father in Anna of the Five Towns and that between Sophia and Mrs. Baines in The Old Wives’ Tale, but in Clayhanger it is much more intense and more acutely observed. Edwin is sensitively introduced in the first two chapters; he has within him “a flamelike an altar-fire,” a passion “to exhaust himself in doing his best.” He is rebelling against his father, whose highest aspiration for his son is to have him take over his printing business.

The advancement of the theme in Clayhanger over its treatment in the earlier novels is that the generational conflict is presented sympathetically on both sides. In chapters 3 and 4, Darius is portrayed as sensitively as Edwin has been previously. In an intensely moving chapter, his childhood of promise, stifled at seven years of age by poverty and abusive child labor, is described. Because Darius as a “man of nine” was unable to “keep the family,” they were sent to the poorhouse. They were rescued from this degradation by Darius’s Sunday school teacher (his soul father), who had recognized the boy’s promise and who secured Darius a decent job as a printer’s devil. This background of deprivation and emotional sterility prevents Darius from expressing his softer emotions, such as his love for Edwin. The reader thoroughly empathizes with Darius’s total dedication to the business he built and by which he supports his family; it is no wonder that he can conceive nothing nobler for Edwin than to carry on this decent business. Because Darius can never discuss his traumatic childhood experiences, Edwin never understands him any more than Darius understands Edwin.

In his desire to hold on to his son and keep him in the family business, Darius simply ignores and overrides Edwin’s inchoate talent for architecture. Later, he uses Edwin’s financial dependence to squelch the young man’s desire to marry Hilda Lessways, whom Edwin has met through the architect Osmond Orgreave. Although Edwin resents his father’s domination, he cannot openly rebel; he feels inadequate before his father’s dominance, and he looks forward to the day when he will have his vengeance. That day comes when Darius becomes ill with softening of the brain, the same ailment that killed Bennett’s own father. The progression of the illness and Edwin’s emotions of triumph, irritation, and compassion are exquisitely detailed. Even after Darius’s death, however, Edwin is not free from his father’s presence, for he becomes increasingly like his father, learning to take pride in the business and tyrannizing his sisters and Hilda, with whom he is reconciled at the end of the book. Clayhanger thus concludes with the apparent defeat of aspiration by the cycle of parental influence. The hope of eventual success is raised, however, by the death of Darius, that primary symbol of Bursley repression, and the return of Hilda, the symbol of aspiration.

Hilda Lessways

In Hilda Lessways, the second book of the trilogy, Bennett picks up Hilda’s parallel story of generational conflict with her mother and cultural conflict with Turnhill, another of the Five Towns. Hilda’s story is far less compelling than Edwin’s, however, and adds little to the plot development. More important, its structure repeats what Bennett did successfully in The Old Wives’ Tale: It contrasts two efforts to cope with Bursley, which provide for a double perspective on the problem, and then brings them together for the denouement made possible by that combined perspective. The double perspective also allows Bennett to maintain his characteristic objectivity and touch of humor.

These Twain

These Twain is the last Five Towns novel; it presents the marriage of Edwin and Hilda. Through a series of adjustments and small victories, the two are able to achieve social success in the Five Towns, which allows them to wean themselves emotionally from the Potteries and leave forever. The Clayhanger trilogy thus deals with escape and success rather than some aspect of failure as in the earlier novels.

In changing his fictional settings from Bursley to London or the Continent, Bennett also extended his themes from success or failure in escaping poverty and provincialism to success or failure in handling the accomplished escape. Perhaps that is another reason, aside from the reasons usually offered, for Bennett’s long period of low productivity and substandard potboilers from 1915 to 1922. Between Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett had a similar period of low-quality work during which he perfected skills that made the Five Towns novels great. Similarly, in his postwar characters Audrey Moze, George Cannon, G. J. Hoape, Lilian Share, and Mr. Prohack, Bennett experimented with stories of people who must cope with financial or social responsibilities for which they may have been poorly prepared. Also in these stories he experimented more boldly with varieties of sexual relationships: in The Lion’s Share, implied lesbian sexuality; in The Pretty Lady, prostitution; in Lilian, the keeping of a mistress. Furthermore, although these next qualities do not show up clearly in the low-quality work of this period, the use of symbols and psychological insight must have been developing in Bennett’s mind. These qualities emerge rather suddenly and very effectively in the novels beginning with Riceyman Steps. They may account for some of the high acclaim that novel received after the period of reorientation, but the adapted themes were perfected by 1923 as well.

Riceyman Steps

The themes in Riceyman Steps are variations on those of the Five Towns novels, not departures, which might seem necessary to a metropolitan setting. The decayed and grimy industrial area of Clerkenwell is in many respects Bursley resituated in London. Henry Earlforward, the miser, represents Bursley’s industrial materialism. Henry, like Edwin Clayhanger, has succeeded in that environment; he has a well-respected bookstore that offers him financial self-sufficiency. Unlike Edwin, however, Henry’s complacent rootedness to Clerkenwell progressively cuts him off from grace, beauty, then love, and finally even life. His wife, Violet, also has financial security, but because she fears the loss of her success, she has become almost as miserly as he.

Both Henry and Violet are described as sensual; Henry’s rich red lips are mentioned several times, and Violet, formerly a widow, wears red flowers in her hat. Money, however, is the chief object of their eroticism. Henry’s miserliness is his passion, and he gives Violet her own safe as a wedding gift. Violet becomes “liquid with acquiescence” after seeing the hoarded disorder of Henry’s house, and she urges him to bed after he has shown her the gold coins in his private safe. The passion for money soon overrides the related passion of human love. Henry and Violet lock doors more tightly about themselves to protect their treasures until each of them is figuratively shut into a private, iron-walled safe. Starving emotionally and intellectually in their isolation, they finally starve themselves physically as well, rather than spend money for adequate food. Here, aspiration gone awry, the fear of failure and the inability to cope with success become literally debilitating diseases. Violet dies of a tumor and malnutrition and Henry of cancer. After death, they are scarcely missed, the ultimate symbols of the stultification that Bennett’s characters strive with varying success to escape.

Final years

After Riceyman Steps, Bennett’s next few novels—Lord Raingo, Accident, and Imperial Palace—continue the themes of coping with success, and theprotagonists are given increasing ability to handle it. Much as Clayhanger finally overcomes the problems of escape, Evelyn Orcham in Imperial Palace is the culminating figure in Bennett’s second cluster of themes. Ironically, Bennett died shortly after he had resolved the problems underlying the themes of his serious novels.

All of Bennett’s serious works are firmly rooted in the realistic tradition (although he used more symbolism than has generally been recognized), and the author excelled in the presentation of detail that makes his themes and characters credible. In the late years of his career, Bennett was criticized by Virginia Woolf for portraying people’s surroundings, rather than the people themselves, and forcing his readers to do his imagining for him, even though he believed that the creation of characters was one of the three most important functions of a novel. Woolf’s criticism was sound enough to do serious damage to Bennett’s standing as a major novelist, and it has been the keystone of critical opinion on Bennett ever since. A sense of environmental impact, however, has always been accepted as an important means of characterization in realistic literature. Woolf’s criticism says as much about changing styles in literature as it does about the merits of Bennett’s fiction. More important, it was a criticism aimed at Bennett’s totalcanon, given that his potboilers had not yet died of their natural ailments when Woolf wrote. Sophia and Constance Baines, Edwin and Darius Clayhanger, and Henry Earlforward are finely articulated, memorable characters. Bennett’s sense of place, characters, and universality of themes combine to make his finest novels memorable; The Old Wives’ Tale is sufficient to secure Bennett’s stature as one of the outstanding novelists of his era.