Anna of the Five Towns
'Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life' Margaret Drabble
Growing up in the world of the 'five towns' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold's novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of great spirit, complexity and integrity.
Arnold Bennett, a versatile and prolific writer who was one of the luminaries of the London literary scene during the early twentieth century, was born on May 27, 1867. He grew up in the environs of Hanley, Staffordshire, one of the Midlands pottery towns that later served as a backdrop for his celebrated Five Towns novels. The son of a solicitor, Bennett received a secondary education but was forced to leave school at the age of sixteen to clerk in his father's firm. Having twice failed his legal examinations, Bennett escaped to London in 1889 to work in law offices, only to realize that he possessed three qualities that would well serve him as a writer. He listed them: 'First…
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