Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

[Janet]

Anna of Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

The �blurb�
This is one of the finest of Arnold Bennett�s novels, a brilliantly detailed picture of life in the Potteries; a tightly knit story of the destructive forces of evangelism and industrial expansion at work in a small community.

Anna lives with her half-sister and their miserly father in a small run-down house, making ends meet. On her twenty-first birthday, her father reveals to her that she is worth �a fortune�, due to investments made by her late mother. However, she is still controlled by her domineering father.

One of the properties she inherits is run by Titus Price and his son Willie. The Prices owe money for rent and Anna watches, feeling helpless, as her father makes demands that they pay what they owe - he is, of course, within his rights to demand rent, but Anna feels sorry for them and worries about the way her father is going about it.

Anna is courting wealthy, popular Henry Mynors and is also friendly with the Sutton family who live opposite - a family of good breeding. She feels controlled by the Methodist church, with which she is actively involved, but her faith is not a strong as she�d like it to be.

Anna goes to the Isle of Man with the Suttons and Henry and eventually he proposes. When they return home, Anna discovers that Titus Price has committed suicide (which was still seen as a terrible sin at the time), leaving Willie to face the debts alone. Willie comes to Anna and confesses that his father has embezzled �50 from church funds. Knowing Willie will be ruined by the scandal, Anna gives him �100 to start a new life in Australia.

All too late Anna realises that it is Willie she loves but she marries Mynors anyway as she has promised she will, and Willie commits suicide.

As this is a social history, I thought it might be a bit like some of the Orwells I�ve read on a similar theme, which I�ve really enjoyed, but I found this to be a bit drier. The story is good and I did enjoy it, but the writing feels laboured in places.

[bookblokes]

Read this as book fro my reading group We all enjoyed it . Maybe because the previous book we did was so awful!!

Intersting to find the main character is a woman , written by a man over a hundred years ago