Book: Anna of the Five Towns
Feb. 25th, 2010 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Arnold Bennett
Details: Originally published 1902; Pub Penguin Classics 2001; ISBN 978-0-14-118416-6
Verdict: Anna of the five towns is a readable and surprisingly feminist character piece.
Reasons for reading it: It seemed like a really good idea to read some classic literature set in this area, now that I've moved here. Besides which, my Dad is a big fan of Bennett so I'd been meaning for a while to give him a go.
How it came into my hands: Library; frankly I'd be very disappointed if the library didn't have Bennett's stuff available!
Anna of the five towns is, like a lot of Bennett's stuff, a portrait of a modern, industrial city in the nineteenth century. But it's also an exploration of what it's like to be a woman who is a full human being, living in a world that expects women to support and nurture men and not really have any thoughts of their own. The social history is really fascinating, and although I am not the world's greatest fan of phonetic representations of accents, it's interesting how recognizable the Stoke dialect is a century since this was written. (It's really distinctive, by the way; before I came here I expected people to sound indistinctly Mancunian, and it's not at all the case, the accent here sounds nothing like the accent of people living 30 miles away.)
Anna is a really interesting protagonist; she spends a lot of the book falling in love, but she's not in the least bit sentimental or soppy. The narrative clearly portrays how unfair the world is to women, but the viewpoint is tight enough that Anna herself never really imagines her fate could be any different. She's likeable, but not an irritatingly saintly Victorian heroine. The portrayal of her relationship with her father, and then her attempt to form adult relationships when she has no good role-models, reminds me strongly of what some friends have told me about living with a parent who is not exactly abusive but is utterly self-centred, unloving and emotionally unstable, so that his children spend all their time desperately scrabbling to avoid his disapproval but never get anything positive beyond the (temporary) avoidance of misery.
The book is almost too scrupulously fair in portraying several sides of a situation. The miser pressing his desperate tenants for back rent gets some degree of sympathy, on the grounds that if someone makes a contract to pay rent, they have to honour it. At the same time, the utter misery and ultimately destruction of tenants who can't pay is portrayed with a lot of pathos (but again, without sentimentality). Mynors, Anna's beau and eventual fiancé, is portrayed as a good man who genuinely loves her, even though he is incapable of really seeing a woman as an individual in her own right. There's a really balanced picture of the effect of industrialization on a town, wealth creation and amazing human innovation, coupled with what in modern terms we would call environmental destruction. The portrait of non-conformist Christianity, so important in local history, is likewise extremely nuanced; you get some Christians who are hypocritical and use the church as a means of social climbing, you get a showy, charismatic preacher with little real substance, and you get some truly religious Christians who succeed in bringing holiness into the world.
I wasn't so keen on was the ending, which felt rather rushed and seemed to come out of nowhere, a little bit. Not so much the tragic endings of some secondary characters, those made sense and were well prefigured, but what happens to Anna herself. It also makes the book seem a little polemical, whereas up to the last chapter it had stuck with presenting the situation and letting the reader draw their own conclusions. In general Aot5T avoids most of the stereotypical flaws of Victorian novels, though I suppose technically speaking it was written after the end of the Victorian era!
Details: Originally published 1902; Pub Penguin Classics 2001; ISBN 978-0-14-118416-6
Verdict: Anna of the five towns is a readable and surprisingly feminist character piece.
Reasons for reading it: It seemed like a really good idea to read some classic literature set in this area, now that I've moved here. Besides which, my Dad is a big fan of Bennett so I'd been meaning for a while to give him a go.
How it came into my hands: Library; frankly I'd be very disappointed if the library didn't have Bennett's stuff available!
Anna of the five towns is, like a lot of Bennett's stuff, a portrait of a modern, industrial city in the nineteenth century. But it's also an exploration of what it's like to be a woman who is a full human being, living in a world that expects women to support and nurture men and not really have any thoughts of their own. The social history is really fascinating, and although I am not the world's greatest fan of phonetic representations of accents, it's interesting how recognizable the Stoke dialect is a century since this was written. (It's really distinctive, by the way; before I came here I expected people to sound indistinctly Mancunian, and it's not at all the case, the accent here sounds nothing like the accent of people living 30 miles away.)
Anna is a really interesting protagonist; she spends a lot of the book falling in love, but she's not in the least bit sentimental or soppy. The narrative clearly portrays how unfair the world is to women, but the viewpoint is tight enough that Anna herself never really imagines her fate could be any different. She's likeable, but not an irritatingly saintly Victorian heroine. The portrayal of her relationship with her father, and then her attempt to form adult relationships when she has no good role-models, reminds me strongly of what some friends have told me about living with a parent who is not exactly abusive but is utterly self-centred, unloving and emotionally unstable, so that his children spend all their time desperately scrabbling to avoid his disapproval but never get anything positive beyond the (temporary) avoidance of misery.
The book is almost too scrupulously fair in portraying several sides of a situation. The miser pressing his desperate tenants for back rent gets some degree of sympathy, on the grounds that if someone makes a contract to pay rent, they have to honour it. At the same time, the utter misery and ultimately destruction of tenants who can't pay is portrayed with a lot of pathos (but again, without sentimentality). Mynors, Anna's beau and eventual fiancé, is portrayed as a good man who genuinely loves her, even though he is incapable of really seeing a woman as an individual in her own right. There's a really balanced picture of the effect of industrialization on a town, wealth creation and amazing human innovation, coupled with what in modern terms we would call environmental destruction. The portrait of non-conformist Christianity, so important in local history, is likewise extremely nuanced; you get some Christians who are hypocritical and use the church as a means of social climbing, you get a showy, charismatic preacher with little real substance, and you get some truly religious Christians who succeed in bringing holiness into the world.
I wasn't so keen on was the ending, which felt rather rushed and seemed to come out of nowhere, a little bit. Not so much the tragic endings of some secondary characters, those made sense and were well prefigured, but what happens to Anna herself. It also makes the book seem a little polemical, whereas up to the last chapter it had stuck with presenting the situation and letting the reader draw their own conclusions. In general Aot5T avoids most of the stereotypical flaws of Victorian novels, though I suppose technically speaking it was written after the end of the Victorian era!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-27 12:59 pm (UTC)You do not mention his talent for describing geography and physical scenes.
The explicit sexuality must have been unusual at the time and is, I think, another aspect of his talent for depicting the whole person.
I agree with you about the ending, but even so you are still left with a sense of tragedy.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-13 01:03 pm (UTC)I think you're right that there is a very strong sense of place in the writing; it's a little odd to read a book that is set around here, but a century ago when absolutely everything has changed in the intervening time. Also agree that the characterization is very strong, including sexuality as part of what it means to be human.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-11 01:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-13 01:05 pm (UTC)I'm not surprised you haven't heard of Bennett. He is one of those writers who are out of fashion at the moment, very much dead white male territory. I don't know if he was ever famous internationally, but in the UK he was considered a significant writer in the pre-post-modern era.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-14 02:31 pm (UTC)