During those moments, the paralyzed Mr. Baines half slips off his bed and dies, a loss that gives rise to a highly unusual mixture of low comedy and high drama: “His face, neck, and hands were dark and congested; his mouth was open, and the tongue protruded between the black, swollen, mucous lips. . . . After having been unceasingly watched for fourteen years, he had, with an invalid’s natural perverseness, taken advantage of Sophia’s brief dereliction to expire. Say what you will, amid Sophia’s horror, and her terrible grief and shame, she had visitings of the idea: he did it on purpose!”

Guilt subdues the “forbidding, difficult, waspish, and even hedge-hog” Sophia, but not, as it happens, for long. The watchful Mrs. Baines (“for mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really are the blindest creatures”) fails to notice the signs of Sophia’s deepening involvement with Gerald Scales, and eventually Sophia elopes with the commercial traveller, first to London, then Paris. Constance, the more passive sister, remains at home in the Five Towns and marries (happily) Samuel Povey. Together, they run the dry goods shop, making occasional changes and modifications to keep up with fashion and the times—it being understood that time moves slowly in the Five Towns, and fashion arrives only belatedly—and raise their son, the emotionally distant and larcenous Cyril. (Like public execution, hot-air balloon travel, and the violent death of elephants, petty theft and deception are subthemes that recur throughout the book.)

And so the Baines sisters’ destinies take off in opposite directions. The novel divides to follow them down their divergent paths, and in the process greatly expands its scope and breadth and depth. Throughout, we continue to feel Bennett’s attempts to adhere to the initial idea that swept into that restaurant with that disorderly woman—an effort we may find ourselves wishing he’d abandoned, since the repeated references to ugly old women frequently make the ruinous effects of age and time seem less like a tragedy than like a punishment for some unspecified misdemeanor—“the crime of being over forty, fat, creased, and worn out.” Indeed, it’s the felony, aggravated by alcoholism, for which one of the novel’s minor characters (the wife of Samuel Povey’s cousin) must pay the ultimate penalty: she is murdered by her husband. “She was vile. Her scanty yellow-grey hair was dirty, her hollowed neck all grime, her hands abominable, her black dress in decay. She was the dishonour of her sex, her situation, and her years. . . . [Samuel] remembered when, years after their marriage, she was still as pretty, artificial, coquettish, and adamantine in her caprices as a young harlot with a fool at her feet. Time and the slow wrath of God had changed her.”

But as so often happens, time and history and the demands of fiction refuse to follow the writer’s somewhat more limited plans. As the novel moves forward, the characters of Constance and especially of Sophia grow more multifaceted, complex; they become more compelling to the reader and, we feel, to Bennett; in fact, the least interesting thing about them is the unfriendly mischief that age is working on their faces and their bodies. Even as Sophia’s marriage founders, and as she rejects the advances of her husband’s friend Chirac, we see another sort of romance blooming before our eyes—the sort of literary love affair that occasionally transpires between a writer and a character in a novel, between Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, Flaubert and Emma Bovary, and here, between Arnold Bennett and Sophia Baines.

Tracking Sophia’s development from a more or less innocent bride to a competent, self-activated, and independent woman, Bennett keeps enlarging his canvas, broadening his range, as if to accommodate the growing spiritual dimensions of its central figure. The novel’s extraordinary set pieces—the execution in Auxerre, the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune, Chirac’s ill-fated attempt to escape Paris in a balloon—are fascinating not only in themselves but because Sophia is experiencing them and learning, perpetually learning. Before we quite know it, the novel has changed from a portrait of the pettinesses and discontents of small-town existence into an astonishing bildungs-roman charting the education of a modern woman.

Everything is a revelation to Sophia, who intercedes between us and the more disorienting aspects of a foreign culture, the “casualness” and “extraordinary lightness” with which Gerald and his French acquaintances arrange their affairs, the coarse bloody-mindedness of the capital punishment buffs who have made a pilgrimage (along with Sophia and Gerald and Chirac) to see the prisoner guillotined at Auxerre, and who are staying at a hotel on the square where the event is to occur:


Some of the people there made a practice of attending every execution. . .