Audiobook · read by volunteers
Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931)
Read by Andy Minter (1934-2017) · 34 chapters · 23 h 18
About the book
Constance and Sophia Baines grow up above their mother’s draper’s shop in a town of the Staffordshire Potteries, two sisters as different as can be. Constance is steady and dutiful; Sophia is restless and longs for a wider life. Arnold Bennett follows them from girlhood through love, marriage, loss and old age, in a story that spans decades and shows how time reshapes everything: the town, the shop and the women themselves. The novel is patient, observant and full of quiet drama, written with a deep affection for ordinary lives. Thirty-four parts, from a preface through the books of the novel, are read by one LibriVox volunteer in about twenty-three hours. A long and absorbing listen for anyone who loves a big realist novel.
Introduction
Arnold Bennett, who lived from 1867 to 1931, was an English novelist, playwright and journalist, much admired in his lifetime. The Old Wives’ Tale, first published in 1908, is generally considered his masterpiece, and it belongs to English fiction of the early twentieth century.
The novel deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother’s drapery shop, through the decades that follow. It is set in the Staffordshire Potteries, a region that Bennett knew well from his own upbringing, and he gives it a solid, realistic presence. The book is organised in parts, with a first book named for Mrs Baines, and its chapters carry such titles as The Square and The Tooth.
Bennett was influenced by French realists, among them Flaubert and Maupassant, and he aimed to show ordinary lives with truthfulness and patience, including the effects of time and ageing. The result is a novel of great breadth, without melodrama, in which small incidents accumulate into a full portrait of a place and a period.
The recording has thirty-four parts, beginning with the preface, and is read throughout by a single LibriVox volunteer, which gives it a consistent voice. It lasts about twenty-three hours. Today it is worth hearing for its humane understanding of its characters and for the pleasure of sinking into a substantial novel that rewards time and attention.
Public domain
Arnold Bennett died in 1931: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text