. . . I knew that I must choose the sort of woman who would pass unnoticed in a crowd.


How rare and fortunate the reader who can finish this passage without flinging down the novel and racing off to her mirror or her bathroom scale! And how difficult to think of another example, in literature, that combines such clinical cruelty with such earnest protestations of sympathy and compassion! What are we to expect from the novel that Bennett is proposing, one that must—we assume—be written from the perspective of the heroine who may not, after all, agree with the writer that the natural effects of age and time are necessarily, in her case, a tragedy, an occasion of extreme pathos?

And what are we to conclude when the novel itself starts out with a statement that will, early on, reveal itself to be either a lie or pure irony or the author’s miscalculation? “Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious.” Soon enough, it will become painfully clear that the Baines sisters could hardly be more conscious of their situation, but for now the narrative has license to leave them to their ignorant bliss and head into a leisurely, Balzacian (think of the opening of Eugénie Grandet) description of their region, of the topology of the surrounding countryside, and of the Five Towns, the indispensable manufacturers of pottery for all of England, that form the setting for a number of Bennett’s novels. (“You cannot drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns.”) Those grim settlements purchased their livelihood by sacrificing natural beauty for “an architecture of ovens and chimneys,” an atmosphere “black as its mud”; “for this it burns and smokes all night, so that Longshaw has been compared to hell.”

In the heart of this inferno (which our heroines are said not to notice) is the town square, on which the Baines girls’ invalid father has a moderately prosperous dry goods shop. Shortly after the novel opens, the teenage girls—“both of them rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood”—are distracted from their idle entertainments by the groans of a certain Mr. Samuel Povey, their father’s loyal assistant, a timid young man afraid of dentists and suffering from a toothache. Obligingly, the sisters produce some laudanum from the medicine chest, and when the patient passes out under its influence, Sophia, the younger and more daring sister, grabs a pair of pliers and pulls Mr. Povey’s tooth. He awakes in time for tea—cockles and mussels—and when he suddenly cries out that he’s lost his tooth in a mussel, it turns out that Sophia has pulled the wrong tooth. Later that night, when the girls retire to bed, Constance learns that Sophia has saved the extracted tooth. A struggle over the ownership of the molar ensues.


It was a battle suddenly engaged in the bedroom. The atmosphere had altered completely with the swiftness of magic. The beauty of Sophia, the angelic tenderness of Constance, and the youthful, naïve, innocent charm of both of them, were transformed into something sinister and cruel. . . . They could hear the gas singing over the dressing-table, and their hearts beating the blood wildly in their veins. They ceased to be young without growing old; the eternal had leapt up in them from its sleep.


Eventually Constance steals the tooth and throws it out the window. I will not be giving too much of the plot away when I say that Constance will wind up married to the recovered Mr. Povey, who, as far as we know, never learns that he was the subject of his sister-in-law’s experiment in dentistry.

What an intensely peculiar series of events, a scene that could hardly have been written just a few years later when the growing popularity of the ideas of Sigmund Freud would have lent the characters’ actions—this rendering of innocent, coltish young girls at war and play—a simultaneously hilarious and pathological subtext! Readers of later generations may sense the anxiety only partly concealed by Bennett’s paean to the power of young women: “The heart of a young girl mysteriously speaks and tells her of her power long ere she can use her power. If she can find nothing else to subdue, you may catch her in the early years subduing a gate-post or drawing homage from an empty chair.” And what a fitting beginning to a novel that seems at first like a Chekovian tragicomedy (or a William Trevor story) of blighted small-town hopes and dreams, but one in which many of the characters appear to be suffering from varyingly severe cases of inappropriate affect.

So much, in these early chapters, is tinged with the surreal—particularly the ways in which one event leads to other seemingly logical or inevitable sequences of incidents that could hardly be more peculiar and that continue to resonate as slightly off notes thrumming just beneath the surface of the novel. Thus Sophia’s first meeting with Gerald Scales—the roguish, attractive traveling salesman who will change her life forever—takes place in her father’s shop, which has been left almost empty because everyone in town (including the Baines family) has gone off to inspect the corpse of the circus elephant recently shot for killing its attendant. (Public executions will figure largely in the novel—the death-by-guillotine that Sophia and Gerald witness in France is perhaps the book’s most brilliant and beautifully orchestrated scene—and the ghost of the dead elephant will reappear in the “undescribed soup” that Sophia is served by the proud restaurant owner who has procured the carcasses of zoo animals from the Jardin des Plantes to feed his hungry customers during the Siege of Paris.)

Just a few minutes of harmless flirtation is all it takes for Sophia, entranced by the captivating Mr. Scales, to forget her invalid father, a lapse for which she is swiftly and harshly punished.