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Editorial Reviews. Review. - "Bennett's masterpiece There are few more moving accounts of the effects of time, the passage of history and the slow.
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For Church Times readers, this may mean that the denominational differences he refers to, and which might be lost on a more secular audience, speak volumes. For all readers, the panorama depicted provides a sort of social history of the Victorian period: its anxieties about faith, its enthusiasm for technology, and its developing economic, cultural, and political assumptions.

Resistance: female voices and memories

Bennett, though, is more than the sum of his tricks. The two sisters — sensible, stolid, stay-at-home Constance, and wayward, flighty, self-possessed Sophia — are depicted with a striking sensitivity and empathy. If they live, it is not only because their surroundings seem compellingly real; it is also because they, too, seem true to life.

It raises some important questions, too.


  1. Other stories.
  2. A world gone mad.
  3. The Old Wives' Tale?

A history of two lives, it explores the ageing and maturing — or not maturing — which all of us will face. As the world changes around them, as they experience love and heartbreak, life and death, Constance and Sophia are forced to confront the painful realities of life: those experienced by every generation, and those generated by the new circumstances of their own modernising age. More intriguingly still, Bennett poses the problem of our own sense of self, and the intriguing possibility that we are born, not made; for, although each sister experiences a profoundly different life, in truth, they remain very much themselves and far more like each other than perhaps either is willing to admit.

Towards the end of the novel, the two middle-aged women are once more reunited, if not wholly reconciled.

ISBN 13: 9780192829665

Both are back where they began, and, if each one has learnt lessons from her life, it is not wholly clear that they have changed all that much. Book Notes Francis Tregian was an English recusant, thought to be the compiler of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a 17th-century manuscript collection of Renaissance keyboard works. Tregian narrates his action-packed tale from his beginnings in Cornwall, through London, France, Rome, and Amsterdam.


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  • Along the way, he meets such characters as Byrd, Morley, Palestrina, Monteverdi — even Shakespeare — and offers readers a glimpse of musical and religious life in Renaissance Europe. After an impoverished and often difficult childhood — her father was assassinated at the end of the Second World War, and she spent a period in a church-run orphanage — she studied literature at the University of Lausanne, and enjoyed a long and illustrious career.

    The Old Wives' Tale (Vintage Classics) - AbeBooks - Bennett, Arnold:

    Not only a prolific novelist and playwright, but also a journalist and film and theatre director, she was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters France in , and was awarded the National Order of Merit France in She died in Save money on books reviewed or featured in the Church Times. To get your reader discount:. St Mark and St Stephen want to grow in number, love and service as the heart of our vibrant local community. A lively, single-parish benefice in the charismatic tradition on the outskirts of Ipswich, the County Town of Suffolk, in a community with a wide social mix and cultural diversity.

    Read reports from issues stretching back to , search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention. See the full programme.

    The Old Wives' Tale

    Book tickets. Sign In Subscribe. Tuesday 14 January The author Arnold Bennett. Reduced to their biological function, symbolised by the red habits they are forced to wear, Handmaids exist purely as breeding vessels. Each is the property of a male Commander, emphasised by their names.


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    • Men who progress high enough in the hierarchy of Gilead are also assigned Wives who wear blue and Marthas who wear green. Marthas, named after a Biblical character, serve as housemaids and cooks. Wives, who are usually sterile, enjoy a higher social status than both the Handmaids and the Marthas, but their lives are still subject to extreme restrictions including the ban on female literacy.

      Caught attempting to escape to Canada, Offred we never discover her true name was sent for re-education at the Handmaid Training Centre, and her memories are dominated by mourning for her lost family.

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      Despite such memories threatening to plunge her into despair, Offred recognises the crucial role they play in preventing her from completely succumbing to the control and demands of the new social system. As well as showing us how problems in the present can lead to a dark future, it also, crucially, insists that change is possible.

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      Offred herself is not a particularly active member of the organisation, though she does benefit from their intervention when her life is in danger. Nevertheless, she demonstrates her own form of resistance by seeking both knowledge and a voice in a system that would deny women either. Such communication can have lethal consequences. The power of female storytelling is a central theme of the novel. Trapped in Gilead where women are prohibited from reading and writing, Offred nevertheless constructs her story in her mind. These recordings are the focus of the Twelfth Symposium of Gileadean Studies; and a partial transcript of the proceedings forms the last word in the novel.

      But the section also stands as a warning.

      Offred herself acknowledged in her narrative that any historical account — including her own — can only ever be a partial reconstruction, even if the narrator has personally experienced the events:.