Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Anna of the Five Towns
    Unavailable
    Anna of the Five Towns
    Unavailable
    Anna of the Five Towns
    Ebook299 pages4 hours

    Anna of the Five Towns

    By Arnold Bennett

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Anna Tellwright, daughter of a wealthy but miserly and dictatorial father, lives in the Potteries area of Staffordshire, England. Her activities are strictly controlled by the Methodist church. Anna struggles for freedom and independence against her father's restraints, and her inward battle between wanting to please her father and wanting to help Willie Price whose father, Titus Price, committed suicide after falling into bankruptcy and debt.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Big Nest
    Release dateJun 13, 2016
    ISBN9781911429630
    Author

    Arnold Bennett

    Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist renowned as a prolific writer throughout his entire career. The most financially successful author of his day, he lent his talents to numerous short stories, plays, newspaper articles, novels, and a daily journal totaling more than one million words.

    Read more from Arnold Bennett

    Related to Anna of the Five Towns

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Writing Family History

      Dec 15, 2021

      Writing Family History
      5 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Simpson Learns A Lesson

      Jul 29, 2021

      Mrs Simpson Learns A Lesson
      4 min read

    • Article

      Camouflage

      Jun 1, 2020

      Camouflage
      9 min read

    • Article

      Summer In The City

      May 30, 2023

      Summer In The City
      2 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      Cosplaying Jane Austen

      Jul 22, 2017

      Cosplaying Jane Austen
      7 min read

    • Article

      The heartbeat OF PARIS

      Apr 3, 2024

      The heartbeat OF PARIS
      9 min read

    • Article

      Scenes From A Marriage

      Mar 23, 2022

      Scenes From A Marriage
      6 min read

    • Article

      Scenes From A Marriage

      Mar 23, 2022

      Scenes From A Marriage
      6 min read

    • Article

      TIME CAPSULE: Child of Wander

      May 20, 2016

      TIME CAPSULE: Child of Wander
      5 min read

    • Article

      Yuletide Reading

      Sep 24, 2020

      Many classic novels and short stories contains Christmas scenes-merry or otherwise. Can you indentify the works from which these holiday passages are excerpted? 1 “Merry Christmas, little daughters! I’m glad you began at once, and hope you will keep

      3 min read

    • Article

      Raiders From The Sea

      Sep 1, 2023

      CANNY LIFTED HER head from the swirls of gold and red and put down the brush, stretching her frozen fingers. The sun fell through the scriptorium window in warm panels, but the room was still cold, and she’d been at work on the manuscript in front of

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Walk In Milk Wood

      Mar 9, 2023

      A Walk In Milk Wood
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Walk In Milk Wood

      Mar 9, 2023

      A Walk In Milk Wood
      5 min read

    • Article

      Diamonds

      Jun 4, 2018

      Diamonds
      9 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Jun 16, 2021

      Great Read
      4 min read

    • Article

      All Of Us Here

      Jun 4, 2020

      All Of Us Here
      6 min read

    • Article

      Jack of Knives

      Jun 3, 2021

      WINNER £100 Jennifer is the author of four middle grade children’s novels published by Maverick (writing as Jenny Moore). Her latest book, The Misadventures of Nicholas Nabb, is set during the same period as her winning story and also includes a scen

      6 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      My Country Childhood

      Sep 4, 2019

      AUTHOR AND FORMER executive director of the Australian Writers Guild, Angela Wales, 71, moved from Bondi in Sydney to Walcha in the Northern Tablelands of NSW when she was five years old. Angela’s father, Bob, was to take over a struggling sheep prop

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Anna of the Five Towns

    4.5/5

    2 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      The books of Arnold Bennett seems curiously neglected these days. I've recently read 'The Card' which I love. In 'Anne Of The Five Towns' Bennett has produced a true tale of pathos. Anne is the eldest daughter of miser Tellwright. On her twenty-first birthday her father hands tells her that she is a rich woman. However her father still firmly controls this legacy so that she cannot do as she wishes with her life. Her life is crossed by two men,one rich and self-assured and the other weak and helpless.She marries the one although she really loves the other.
    • 4/5
      Early 20th century. After the Trollope book, this is an interesting take on capitalism and class. Also the story of the miser--which is interesting in the context of "Our Mutual Friend" which I'm also reading. Bennett is so much more intense about the issues of class and socialism which come into view in the late Victorian and early 20th century. Also mixes this in with an approach to methodism, religion, and also the potteries. This is a fine book and much of the twentieth rather than the 19th century. (Listened audiobook.)
    • 4/5
      I loved this novel because, as I heard somewhere, it raised the ordinary to extraordinary.And that's exactly what makes this a thrilling novel. Nothing exceptional goes on, just what life for a young woman in an industrial village at the end of the XIX century might have been like. Unadorned and real.Anna is an ordinary girl, who leads a simple existence with her tyrannical father and her younger half sister. She performs her duties without complaint, without any fuss or expectations. She is humble and austere and shy and not sure of what religion or love means, even though society imposes them on her. When she turns 21, her oppressive father announces that she 's come into a great inheritance left to her from her deceased mother which makes her a wealthy and eligible woman. But that doesn't change anything, she is still depending on her miserly father.Although Anna consents into everything imposed to her, she kind of starts making her own decisions to thread her future. While receiving constant attention from Henry Mynors, a young promising businessman, who wants to marry her, she can't help thinking of poor and humble Willie Prince, one of her tenants who is in deep debt. Her first own decision might change life as she had known it.The end of the story left me breathless, so many emotions in such a few lines, without great passion, only with open sincerity, only with the pouring hearts of two people who are destined not to be together, and their cold acceptance to take life as it is. Hard, unfair and sad.Great first experience of Bennett's writing. I'll read more by him definitely!
    • 4/5
      Arnold Bennett has never been particularly fashionable; Virginia Woolf hadn't much time for him (the feeling was mutual) and French critic George Lafourcade describes Anna of the Five Towns as tending to 'dullness complete and unrelieved'. DH Lawrence also responded negatively to the novel, but then again he dismissed 'all the modern stuff since Flaubert'. Margaret Drabble comes closer to my own view of it: she describes Anna as 'much more spirited [than Balzac's Eugenie Grandet], more modern, more subtle. In fact, she is much more real.'It is Anna herself who makes this novel come alive. Early on, Anna learns that her coming-of-age inheritance from her mother makes her a very wealthy young woman. However, the money makes no real difference to her life - it is tied up in stocks, shares and businesses and remains under the control of her tyranical father. The world of finance is utterly alien to Anna. She becomes, on her father's advice, the 'sleeping partner' in the firm owned by Henry Mynors, her soon-to-be fiance. Men, it seems, are destined to hold Anna's pursestrings. On the whole, she doesn't mind: modest Anna's wants are few.Anna is very much her own person, though. She shows this quietly, often with difficulty, such as when she refuses to speak the words 'I am for Christ', which she knows would make Henry and Mrs Sutton (wife of prosperous Alderman Sutton) very happy, because she doesn't feel them in her heart. She risks her father's wrath when she burns the forged document that could have ruined Willie Price, and indeed Anna's father is furious when the deed is discovered, and cannot forgive her.She and Henry are basically 'good' people - quietly so, without ostentation - and there is no reason to suppose that their marriage will be a miserable one, even though Anna realises that she doesn't love Henry and does love the departing (for Australia) Willie Price. If this is, as DH Lawrence claims, a novel about 'resignation', it's a form of resignation that is easy to identify with. Anna is not heroic (except in small, quiet ways); she is a decent, likeable young woman who will make the best of what life throws at her. I find her wholly admirable. [Sept 2004]