The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
Published 1908 · 562 pages · 216,723 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Old Wives' Tale to read?
The Old Wives' Tale scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Bennett writes clear, ironic Edwardian prose with period and dialect touches like antimacassars, gimp and 'wankiness'. It is more accessible than Fitzgerald's Gatsby but more formal than contemporary fiction.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences run long in descriptive set pieces such as the Five Towns survey, but dialogue is brisk and plain. Closest to Ishiguro's measured clarity, with more digressive looseness.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The book stays with shops, meals, teeth and tea, though the narrator reflects on time and change. Concrete like Lee's Mockingbird, with a touch more philosophy.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Bennett piles up the domestic detail of parlour carpets, shop tickets, castor-oil and funerals, and layers in social history. It is dense but easy to follow, nearer Gatsby than War and Peace.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- The narrator comments openly and explains motives, from Mrs. Baines's private thoughts to Sophia's. Readers infer little, though the irony needs reading between lines.
- Symbolic density: 38 out of 100
- The elephant, the tooth, the cenotaph and the pit-shaft carry meaning, but Bennett's realism keeps them literal first. Lighter than Gatsby's green light, closer to Ishiguro's restrained symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The narrator mocks Mrs. Baines's dignity, Mr. Povey's cowardice and the town's pride, while loving them. The irony is gentle and constant, as in Moby-Dick's humour amid tragedy, but more consistently comic.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- Nothing in the supplied opening is left open; Bennett resolves each episode and states its consequence. The wider book is a closed chronicle of two lives ending in death.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- The supplied part is chronological with an occasional later-narrator aside, divided into chapters. The wider book splits into two sisters' lives and countries, but remains linear, like War and Peace.
How The Old Wives' Tale is regarded
The Old Wives' Tale holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Where the story of The Old Wives' Tale takes place
- The Five Towns and Paris, 1860s-1900s (1862 to 1907), the main setting