. There was a woman who could recall the dying words of all the victims of justice for twenty years past. The table roared with hysteric laughter at one of the woman’s anecdotes. . . . How a criminal had said to the priest who was good-naturedly trying to screen the sight of the guillotine from him with his body: “Stand away now, parson. Haven’t I paid to see it?”


Even this becomes part of Sophia’s education, so that as she observes the execution from her hotel window (from which she has just seen the faithless Gerald emerging from a house with a woman) she watches the priest inserting himself between the guillotine and its about-to-be victim.

Meanwhile, what we are watching is a woman receiving a fairly stiff and radical dose of reality, a series of progressively more intense shocks that awaken her to what is required if she intends to survive. Unlike her larcenous nephew Cyril, who filches money from the till in his family’s shop, Sophia—deciding to steal from Gerald—is (as the rest of the novel confirms) achieving a moral triumph that will save her own life:


She had no silly, delicate notions about stealing. She obscurely felt that, in the care of a man like Gerald, she might find herself in the most monstrous, the most impossible dilemmas. Those notes, safe and secret in her skirt, gave her confidence, reassured her against the perils of the future, and endowed her with independence. The act was characteristic of her enterprise and her fundamental prudence. It approached the heroic.


Sophia suffers and learns, survives and prevails, and as Bennett grows more and more taken with her, his novel comes to know her better and better. Following the delicately nuanced turns of her relationship with Chirac, we begin to agree that The Old Wives’ Tale is, as its fans have claimed, a powerful and convincing novel written by a man, from the point of view of a woman. Its creator is no longer the solitary restaurant patron whose meal is being disrupted by a grotesque old woman, but rather, a writer fully capable of imagining how a woman like Sophia might see the world, and might want to be seen. So much is unexpected and unpredictable, even the effects of age, so that twice in the novel (once near the middle, once near the end) Bennett gives us the same description of Sophia, with only slight variations, a portrait that could hardly be less like that of the old woman in the preface:


Sophia was such a woman as, by a mere glance as she utters an opinion, will make a man say to himself, half in desire and half in alarm lest she reads him too: “By Jove! she must have been through a thing or two. She knows what people are!”

He was pleased by the quick responsiveness of her temperament, and the masterful vigour which occasionally flashed out in her replies. He noticed the hardly perceptible distortion of her handsome, worn face, and he said to himself. “She’s been through a thing or two.”


As the novel draws toward its conclusion, and the sisters are reunited, Bennett seems to have learned, and to be able to tell us, an enormous amount about the ways in which women behave with one another, the delicate compromises and dispositions of weakness and strength, power and compliance.

Reading the The Old Wives’ Tale provides the extraordinary experience of watching a novel grow and deepen along with its heroines. Planned as a taxonomic study of female physical disintegration, Bennett’s book becomes an account of a woman’s psychological and spiritual triumph. Having wanted to report to his readers on what society was like and how it changed in the decades before the novel was written, Arnold Bennett managed to tell us something of what would happen in the world, how human behavior would change, decades and decades after his remarkable book appeared.


FRANCINE PROSE is the author of nine novels, including Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams, and Primitive People, two story collections, and most recently a collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and numerous other publications. A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, she writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal. The winner of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, two NEA grants, and a PEN translation prize, she has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Arizona, the University of Utah, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. A film based on her novel Household Saints was released in 1993.




COMMENTARY


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REBECCA WEST


W.