Henry calms many of her fears: he's wonderful with Agnes, and even with her father - teasing the former, and braving the latter (even daring to ask for more beef).

stato il primo lavoro di Bennett che io abbia mai letto, perché qui in Italia è caduto un po’ nel dimenticatoio e certamente meriterebbe di essere riscoperto al più presto, poiché è uno scrittore abile e avvincente. This book is good at the beginning, but it gets better and better as you go. At the start, I made guesses about where the story was leading. Some of my guesses proved to be wrong! The faith of other characters, however, is genuine: Mrs. Sutton’s is particularly attractive, but even Henry’s is perfectly genuine. His Christian life may seem too perfect, but this is made to seem so by Bennett to underline Anna’s unease with him and to explain why in fact she fell in love with Willie. His tentativeness and confessed failure awake maternal protectiveness in her, an emotion that had survived the dessication of the Tellwright household. Cuando llega a la mayoría de edad , su padre le anuncia que ha recibido una gran herencia que le dejó su madre fallecida, lo que la convierte en una mujer rica. Pero eso no cambia nada ya que sigue dependiendo de su avaro padre. Anna learns from him that she is coming into an inheritance that makes her a wealthy woman, yet she must still beg him for shopping money (until a fateful act of rebellion late in the story). Meanwhile, she is being pursued in an oh so decorous fashion by one of the most eligible bachelors and up and coming entrepreneurs in the city.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 was much troubled by this, but she knew her duty was to be obedient to her father even though it was to precipitate the catastrophe that nobody would give a toss about. Of those visiting a new park, "people going up to criticize and enjoy this latest outcome of municipal enterprise... housewives whose pale faces, as of prisoners free only for a while, showed a naive and timorous pleasure in this unusual diversion; young women made glorious by richly coloured stuffs and carrying themselves with the defiant independence of good wages... a small well-dressed group whose studious repudiation of the crowd betrayed a conscious eminence of rank." There are attempts to evoke the colour and chatter of the “five towns”, where the quiet courtship of Anna and Mr Mynors dominates gossip. Conrad Nelson’s production leans heavily on the presence of the Phoenix Singers, a local choir whose songs neatly stitch together various scenes. But these musical sequences often feel underpowered, as do some of the supporting performances. Rarely do we get a sense of what’s at stake. 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.

It seemed a face for the cloister... resigned and spiritual melancholy peculiar to women who through the error of destiny have been born into a wrong environment."

The towns are "forbidding of aspect - sombre, hard-featured, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys had soiled and shrivelled the surrounding country" to a "gaunt and ludicrous travesty of rural charms". This then segues into something rather different: "embrace the whole smoke-girt amphitheatre... this disfigurement is merely an episode in the unending warfare of man and nature and calls for no contrition... Nature is repaid for some of her notorious cruelties."Bennett grew up in Staffordshire, but left it for London as a young man. Although no doubt he continued to visit, he never again lived there. However, we can see from this book that his childhood home left a deep impression on him. Bennett describes the Five Towns in loving detail. By day it might be a dirty townscape of pottery works and coal mines, but by night it is lit by distant fires which give it a fairyland glamour. In its Midlands setting, chapel culture, and industrial descriptions, Anna of the Five Towns also anticipates the novels of D. H. Lawrence. Like Lawrence, Bennett stresses the ugliness of industrialized urbanization, the ruination of the countryside, and the circumscribed, barren lives of many of the working class. Bennett, however, unlike Lawrence, does not attempt poetry in his style but veers toward the documentary. One feels there is some civic pride left in Bennett, just as civic pride continued among the inhabitants of the Potteries later in the century. More important, Bennett does not point toward a counterculture; spiritual life, insofar as it is still possible, is to be found in traditional interior modes of Christian self-examination as defined by the practices and traditions of Methodist spirituality. Como lo cuenta . De una forma sencilla, detallista, pausada pero con un tono crítico. El costumbrismo que tanto me gusta, el espacio que dedica a las gentes, la descripción de las mujeres que desafiaban lo establecido... El hecho de que parece que no pasa nada pero todo pasa sobre todo las emociones y los sentimientos. Y el final.... Un final que espero que me comentéis que os ha parecido porque teneis que leerlo.