Anna of the Five Towns

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Arnold Bennett termina il libro con una sola frase che si stampa nella mente del lettore e su cui quest’ultimo ritorna a rimuginare nei giorni successivi; una frase che mi ha ricordato quella finale di Martin Eden, per il suo effetto inaspettato. The novel was adapted for the BBC Home Service's Saturday Night Theatre by Olivia Manning in February 1962. In 1985 BBC2 broadcast a four-part serialisation of Anna of the Five Towns, starring Lynsey Beauchamp and Peter Davison and adapted by John Harvey. In 2017, to mark Arnold Bennett's 150th birthday, a stage version of Anna by Deborah McAndrew was put on at the New Vic Theatre in Stoke.

I thought a lot about Anna’s inability to feel the sentiments of love and passion. I view this an important element of the story. Why is she this way? Why did she feel as she did about her suitor? Why was she drawn to both him and then Willie? Isn’t it understandable that she should first feel motherly love and that only later could this be transformed into passion toward a mate? Was she even able to recognize love growing up alongside her father? So yes, character portrayal is an essential part of the story. Anna and Henry marry. No more is heard of Willie Price; the story hints that he too commits suicide. Ephraim Tellwright is a former Methodist preacher, but he's a very un-Christian emotional bully. The love of money is perhaps the root of his evil. He is a canny investor, a harsh landlord, and spends almost nothing, so his wealth has accumulated, and he's very proud of how well he's managed Anna's inheritance before she came of age. This book is rather like a factory Anna visits: "No stage of the manufacture was incredible by itself, but the result was incredible."Mynors was deeply touched by her servitude. "You clearly know your place," he said. "Allow me to do the honour of becoming your husband."

The separation from the tight paternal grip lightened Anna's mood on holiday and she nearly ventured to initiate a conversation before thinking better of it. Fortunately Mrs Sutton's daughter caught influenza and Anna was able to stay indoors and nurse her. "Tis far better that someone dull should risk infection," she thought, "than that Mrs Sutton should be put in jeopardy." A plot summary would make this short, but perfectly formed novel sound parochial, unoriginal and maybe dull. It is not. Bennett is a wonderful observer and writer of the small-scale aspects that make life real and characters spring to life. He's also pretty good at writing female characters. In fact, by far the weakest character is male: the faultless Henry Mynors. Caring for the characters as I did, I needed to also know what would happen to them and how the story would end.

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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. Competent, self-contained but inexperienced, Anna has been understandably dominated by her miserly tyrant of a father who has been punctilious in growing the fortune left her by her deceased mother, but cannot bring himself to give her free access to the money, only arbitrary duties such as his brutal insistence that she pursues rent arrears on one of her properties. Denied a normal, loving upbringing, it is hardly surprising that Anna find it difficult to establish a spontaneous romantic relationship with Mynors. She admires him, even imagines him in her bed, but it is only a matter of time before she comprehends that life with him means exchanging one tyrant for another, admittedly more benevolent than her father. It is easier for her to extend the maternal love she feels for her young sister to a weak, inept man who needs her support. 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." 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. Dato che il romanzo trae libera ispirazione da "Eugenie Grandet" di Balzac, quest’ultimo è uno dei prossimi in lettura.

How calm and stately she is," Mynors thought, as they walked along the forbidding street that united the five contiguous towns that marked the ancient home of the potter. "I mean to call on your father to discuss business," he said, "but I trust you will be in." Anna's heart shuddered with expectant perturbation. Il ritratto di Anna, che Bennett ci regala, mostra tutta la tenerezza che lo anima e porta l’impronta del grande Turgenev. Al contrario di Eugenie Grandet, Anna è molto più brillante, più moderna, più abile, insomma molto più reale e complessa. In lei ho rivisto molto di Lisa (la protagonista di Nido di nobili): la stessa aspirazione al bene e lo stesso impulso che le porta a volere bene al più vulnerabile tra i due uomini da cui si sentono amate; ma forse, anzi soprattutto, nella scelta che compiono cioè quella di perseguire risolutamente e senza esitazioni il proprio dovere.

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Arnold Bennett, durante la sua vita, non è stato solo uno scrittore di romanzi ma anche di racconti, saggi, opere teatrali, è stato impiegato nel ministero della propaganda durante il primo conflitto mondiale, e anche giornalista, critico, conferenziere, memorialista, insomma una vita abbastanza impegnativa e frenetica. Henry corteggia Anna, con l’intenzione di sposarla, prestandogli attenzioni cui lei non è abituata. La ragazza è attratta da lui, e prova a raggiungere e ad unirsi al suo fervore religioso ma, essendo troppo insicura e non avendo fiducia in se stessa, non riesce a redimersi o accettare pubblicamente Dio nelle assemblee religiose metodiste. In it was reflected the conscientious labour of generations. It had a soft and assuaged appearance, as though it had never been new and could never have been new. All its corners and edges had long lost the asperities of manufacture, and its smooth surfaces were marked by slight hollows similar in spirit to those worn by the naked feet of pilgrims into the marble steps of a shrine. 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.

In many ways, my life is utterly different from Anna's, but in some key ways, I can identify with her more than I might wish to. 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. Quest’anno, nel mese di maggio, ricorreva il 150 anniversario della nascita dello scrittore inglese; per celebrare quest’avvenimento in Inghilterra, si sono svolte commemorazioni, celebrazioni e anche una trasposizione teatrale di questo romanzo.This isn't the upper class of Virginia Woolf and their despising of people "in trade", this is the Victorian England of the middle class where the Protestant ethic of hard work is key to the exploitation of the lower classes in the pursuit of money. The financial industry, banks and investment opportunities are now all respectable and no longer need to be thought of with disgust by Christians, who had previously banned it for themselves but allowed Jews to do it and called them, "money lenders". 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. An old dresser: "Seventy years of continuous polishing by a dynasty of priestesses of cleanliness" looked "as though it had never been new." 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.