,000 words of my Staffordshire novel _Anna
Tellwright_.'

"This last was not published in book form till 1902 under the title of
_Anna of the Five Towns_; but in the ten years that had elapsed since he
came to London, Bennett had risen from a clerk at six dollars a week to be
a successful 'editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all
arts' with a comfortable suburban residence. Still he was not satisfied;
he was weary of journalism and the tyranny of his Board of Directors. He
threw up his editorial post, with its certain income, and retired first to
the country and then to a cottage at Fontainebleau to devote himself to
literature.

"In the autumn of 1903, when Bennett used to dine frequently in a Paris
restaurant, it happened that a fat old woman came in who aroused almost
universal merriment by her eccentric behaviour. The novelist reflected:
'This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from
these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her
singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a
heart-rending novel out of a woman such as she.' The idea then occurred to
him of writing the book which afterwards became _The Old Wives' Tale_, and
in order to go one better than Guy de Maupassant's 'Une Vie' he determined
to make it the life-history of two women instead of one. Constance, the
more ordinary sister, was the original heroine; Sophia, the more
independent and attractive one, was created 'out of bravado.' The project
occupied Bennett's mind for some years, during which he produced five or
six novels of smaller scope, but in the autumn of 1907 he began to write
_The Old Wives' Tale_ and finished it in July, 1908. It was published the
same autumn and though its immediate reception was not encouraging, before
the winter was over it was recognised both in England and America as a
work of genius. The novelist's reputation was upheld, if not increased, by
the publication of Clayhanger in 1910, and in June, 1911, the most
conservative of American critical authorities, the New York Evening Post,
could pronounce judgment in these terms:

"'Mr. Bennett's Bursley is not merely one single stupid English provincial
town. His Baineses and Clayhangers are not simply average middle class
provincials foredoomed to humdrum and the drab shadows of experience. His
Bursley is every provincial town, his Baineses are all townspeople
whatsoever under the sun. He profe