Psychology descriptive and explanatory, a treatise of the phenomena, laws and development of human mental life

Superficially the novel states only the obvious; everything declines and dies. But it discovers new meanings in the old theme by the highly articulated symmetries of its presentation. Set in the area of Bennett's birth, the six towns of England's potteries district, the novel depicts virtually the entire lives of Constance and Sophia Baines, the daughters of a shop owner in Bursley, "the mother of the Five Towns." It begins with the sisters on the threshhold of adulthood; it ends after Constance, the older, less rebellious and longer-lived, has died. Inspired by Maupassant's Une Vie (A woman's life, 1883), Bennett goes his master one better not only in doubling the depicted lives, but in using them as an extended metaphor for the life of the nation from the mid -1860s to the turn of the century. Where Maupassant's work is an intensive examination of individual psychology, Bennett's manipulates the congruities between personal and public life. It begins with the death of John Baines, the semiparalyzed father of Constance and Sophia Baines, who serves as a symbol of high Victorianism ...»