Novel: The Old Wives' Tale

Overview
"The Old Wives' Tale" charts the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, from their childhood in a midland town called Bursley through the slow accumulation of years and experiences that divide them. Beginning in the mid-19th century and stretching toward the early 20th, the narrative treats ordinary life with exacting seriousness, following the sisters as they take separate roads: one staying at home and embracing the patterns of provincial domesticity, the other fleeing to the metropolis to seek independence and change. The novel is panoramic in scope yet intimate in focus, showing how personal choices, chance, and the passage of time shape character.
Bennett renders a social portrait of a changing England by attending to everyday objects, business details, and the rhythms of work and family. The novel's time span lets small moments accrue significance; seemingly trivial events reverberate across decades, while the slow wear of habit and memory reveals itself in altered faces, emptied houses, and the transformed meanings of once-vivid hopes. Humor and compassion sit beside a steady melancholic strain, producing a realism that privileges fidelity to lived experience over melodrama.

Main narrative and characters
Constance remains in Bursley, marrying and building a life bound to the shop, the home, and local obligations. Her existence is marked by routine, responsibility, and a conscientious devotion to family and business. Those domestic details, ledgers, inventories, small domestic triumphs and setbacks, become the measures of a person's worth and endurance. Constance's arc is not one of sensational events but of accumulated moral labor, the dignity and cost of constancy, and the quietly dramatic effects of aging.
Sophia's story moves outward. As a young woman she leaves the constrained world of Bursley for Paris, seeking education, excitement, and a modern identity. There she confronts new freedoms and temptations, engages with urban commerce and relationships, and experiences both success and misfortune. Her life registers the exhilarations and precarities of cosmopolitan existence, and her return to England later in life carries the weight of displacement and changed expectations. The contrast between Sophia's restless striving and Constance's rooted steadiness provides the novel's central tension: divergent responses to opportunity, desire, and duty.

Themes and tone
Time is the dominant theme: its impartial pressure, its capacity to erode illusions and to dignify the ordinary. Bennett explores how character develops under the twin influences of circumstance and choice, how social mobility and modernity affect women's lives, and how the interior, often suppressed life of thought and memory persists amid outward routines. The novel considers marriage, commerce, ambition, and the constraints placed on women by social norms, revealing how personality adapts, or fails to adapt, to new conditions. Tonally, the book balances minute observational coolness with a humane sympathy that keeps its characters alive beyond caricature.
Bennett's realism is marked by an attention to material culture and psychology: objects, business practices, and domestic tasks are described with surgical precision, while inner life receives equal weight through careful rendering of moods, recollections, and the slow accrual of regret or contentment. Irony and tenderness coexist, producing a moral viewpoint that is neither sentimental nor cruel.

Style and legacy
The novel's structure, its sweeping chronology and dual portraits, helped establish Bennett as a major chronicler of provincial England. Praised as his masterpiece by many contemporaries and later critics, the book influenced subsequent writers interested in social detail and psychological realism. Its strength lies in turning the apparently trivial into the emblematic: a shop ledger or a remembered day becomes a repository for a lifetime. Today it is read both as a social document of a particular era and as a study of how ordinary lives contain their own epic proportions, measured not by dramatic upheaval but by endurance, adaptation, and the slow revelation of character.