Regarded as one of Bennett's finest The Old Wives' Tale (1908) was inspired by a chance encounter in a Parisian restaurant. It follows the lives of two very different French sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, from their youth, through their work in their mother's draper's shop, to old age. The 200,000-word masterpiece was written by hand in ten months during a period in which Bennett suffered from insomnia.

The book consists of four volumes containing coming of age novels set in the Midlands of Victorian England. The story follows Edwin Clayhanger as he leaves school, takes over the family business, and falls in love. The second novel Hilda Lessways tells the story from her coming of age, her working experiences as a shorthand clerk and keeper of a lodging house in London and Brighton. These Twain, the third in the Clayhanger series, chronicles the married...

Published in 1918, the fourth and last book of the Clayhanger series, The Roll-Call, follows the young life of George, Edwin Clayhanger's stepson who becomes the architect his stepfather had wished to be. Unabashedly confident, George mounts the social ladder and in the end, we find him enlisting for active service.

Written in 1911, The Card is Bennett's brilliantly funny short novel that chronicles the rise of the ever-optimistic Edward Henry ("Denry") Machin from washerwoman's son to Mayor of Bursley through luck, initiative and wit, and his greatest asset-a talent for "cheering up" people.

Arthur Prohack is a Treasury official admired and feared by people at all levels of government. At home, he is affection itself to his quiet, ever-anxious wife, Marian, and to their two grown children. Drama unfolds with arrival of debtor whose loan Mr. Prohack had long ago written off. In this satirical work Arnold Bennett exposes the boundaries between the English middle and upper classes and the corrosive effects of too much money.

Like several of Bennett's works, Price of Love (1914), is set in "Five Towns." It is the story of Rachel Fleckring and the Maldon family, for whom Rachel works as a maid to the elderly Mrs. Maldon. Rachel falls foolishly in love with Mrs. Maldon's nephew, the charming Louis Fores, only to discover the high price she has to pay for that affection.

Priam Farll is a world famous painter who is very shy and happiest out of the limelight. When Henry Leek, the painter's valet, dies unexpectedly, Priam seizes the opportunity to change identities with his unknown assistant and retreat to a much valued quiet life. What started as an impulse evolves into a more and more complicated predicament.

Lilian, in dark blue office frock with an embroidered red line round the neck and detachable black wristlets that preserved the ends of the sleeves from dust and friction, sat idle at her flat desk in what was called the small room at Felix Grig's establishment in Clifford Street, off Bond Street. There were three desks, three typewriting machines and three green-shaded lamps. Only Lilian's lamp was lighted, and she sat alone, with darkness above...

For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love-and by love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous dreams.