His final novel, Imperial Palace, came out in 1930.

Arnold Bennett died in London of typhoid fever on March 27, 1931. At the time of his death Sinclair Lewis deemed Bennett “one of the really great novelists,” and H. L. Mencken reflected: “At his best Bennett was clearly entitled to rank among the half dozen most important English novelists of his time. His two principal works, The Old Wives’ Tale and Clayhanger, are little short of masterpieces.” Critic Carl Van Doren concurred: “Arnold Bennett brought into English fiction a range of realism which it had never had before, particularly as concerned with English provincial life. ‘The Five Towns’ of Arnold Bennett must long remain among the famous territories of the British imagination.” The Journal of Arnold Bennett, a fascinating account of his life and times, was issued posthumously in three volumes beginning in 1932.



INTRODUCTION

by Francine Prose








The Old Wives’ Tale begins in a manner so arresting and bizarre that we may find ourselves wondering why our friends haven’t been calling up and insisting that we read it. What makes the first sections so riveting are the tantalizing glimpses of antic, subversive id peeking from behind the sturdy superego of the Victorian literary man whose stated ambition was to create a British equivalent of the French realistic novel, of Balzac or Zola. Then the fog of obsession clears, and slowly the novel changes, offering us the pleasure of watching it evolve into something larger and greater even than its creator intended.

If Arnold Bennett’s preface dizzies the modern sensibility, it’s not so much because of the vertiginous gap between the social behavior he describes and what we intuit would be permissible today, but because of the more unsettling chasm between the lines of the text—the near-schizophrenic divide between the writer’s language and what he claims to be doing.

In 1903, four years before Bennett wrote the novel, he was, he tells us, living in Paris and used to dine at a restaurant where, one evening, the Muse made her appearance, disguised as a repulsive old hag:


She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels, which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. . . .

I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: “The woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heart-rending novel out of the history of a woman such as she.” Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque—far from it!—but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. . . .

It was at this instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became The Old Wives’ Tale. Of course I felt that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously unsympathetic.