Resumen
Resumen de Cuento de viejas
Para quién es
For readers who love novels about family, work and the passing of the years, and who enjoy a richly drawn English town. The contrasting lives of two sisters offer choices, love, mistakes and courage.
De qué trata este libro
The Old Wives' Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett, published in 1908. Bennett grew up in the Staffordshire Potteries, and he set the book in the Five Towns, the cluster of pottery towns he knew from boyhood. It follows two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, from their girlhood in the 1860s to their old age.
Bennett found the idea in Paris, where he lived for some years. He watched an elderly woman in a restaurant and thought that she had once been young, slim and full of hope. He wanted to write a book that would show a whole life, with all the slow changes that time makes in a face and in a heart. He worked in the French manner he admired, with detail and steady observation.
What you get is two lives that begin in one house and then part. One sister stays in a smoky English market town. The other goes to Paris and lives through a siege and a war. You get shops, marriages, money, quarrels and the long middle years that most novels skip. Above all you feel time passing. The first key point is where the sisters begin, in a draper's shop in the town of Bursley.
En este resumen
- 1A Draper's Shop Shapes Two GirlsFree
- 2Two Sisters With Opposite Temperaments
- 3Mr Povey Guards the Shop
- 4Sophia Chooses Passion Over Home
- 5Constance Stays and Builds a Quiet Life
- 6Sophia Rebuilds Herself in Paris
- 7Time Wears Down Both Lives
- 8What the Novel Is Really About
- 9How Bennett Builds His Slow Realism
Idea clave 1 de 9
A Draper's Shop Shapes Two Girls
The novel opens in Bursley, one of the five pottery towns of Staffordshire. The Baines family lives above a draper's shop on St Luke's Square, the busy centre of the town. Mr Baines, the father, is an invalid who rarely leaves his room. The shop is run by Mrs Baines with a small staff of assistants. Bennett fills the opening pages with counters, bolts of cloth and the careful habits of a business that has served the town for years.
Bursley is not a pretty place. Its skies are dark with the smoke of the potbanks, the works where china and earthenware are fired. Its people are plain, hardworking and proud of being so. Bennett writes about them with affection and a sharp eye, and he never mocks them. He treats their small daily concerns as worth the same attention as any great event.
Mrs Baines rules the household with firm good sense. She believes in order, thrift and good manners. She watches her two daughters closely, and she expects them to grow into respectable women of the town. Behind her stern manner there is real love, though she shows it in rules more than in words.
The shop matters because it is the world in small. Everything the family fears or hopes for passes through it, from money to marriage to gossip. The assistants live close to the family and share its meals and its worries. Bennett lets us learn their habits and their small vanities, so the shop feels like a living thing.
The year is in the 1860s, and the town is changing slowly. New fashions arrive in the shop, the railways bring news, and the old ways begin to loosen. The girls grow up inside this slow change without noticing it. Bennett wants us to notice it, because the whole book is about how time works on people who are not watching.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Cuento de viejas
What is The Old Wives' Tale about?
It follows two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, from their youth in a draper's shop in the English pottery town of Bursley to old age. One stays at home and the other lives in Paris.
Where is Bursley and what are the Five Towns?
Bursley is a fictional version of Burslem, one of the six real pottery towns of Staffordshire. Bennett called them the Five Towns, and he used them as the setting for many of his novels.
When was The Old Wives' Tale written?
Arnold Bennett published it in 1908. The story begins in the 1860s and runs for decades. It is fiction, but its details of shops, towns and the siege of Paris draw on real history.
Is The Old Wives' Tale hard to read?
The language is clear and the story is easy to follow.
What is the main message of The Old Wives' Tale?
Bennett shows that ordinary lives hold real drama and that time changes everyone slowly and surely. Choices made in youth shape what follows, and a quiet life can carry deep joy and sorrow.