Old Wives' Tale

Two sisters. One stays. One runs. Seventy years later, the accounts differ wildly about who lived. Constance Baines tends the family drapery shop in the industrial town of Burslem, marries a respectable physician, and builds a life of quiet, accumulated routine. Her sister Sophia abandons everything for Paris, chasing a stranger into a marriage that scandalizes the family and vanishes for decades. When they reunite in old age, the years have not healed so much as complicated their understanding of each other. Arnold Bennett's masterpiece traces both women across half a century with an eye for the telling domestic detail and a patience that mirrors the slow rhythms of ordinary life. The novel asks an uncomfortable question: did the sister who stayed miss everything, or did the one who fled merely exchange one set of limitations for another? Bennett renders the stuff of daily existence with the intensity other writers reserve for wars and revolutions.