These four stories embrace the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following the narration from their youth, working in mothers' draper's shop, into old age. It is generally regarded as Bennett's finest works.
About the Author: Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 - 27 March 1931) was an English writer best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as the theater, journalism, propaganda and films. Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley was one of the Six Towns that were joined together at the beginning of the 20th century as Stoke-on-Trent and are depicted as "the Five Towns" in some of Bennett's novels. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family moved to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem. Bennett was educated in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Bennett was employed by his father, but the working relationship failed. He found himself doing jobs such as rent-collecting which were uncongenial. Bennett also resented the low pay: it is no accident that the theme of parental miserliness is important in several of his novels. In his spare time he was able to do a little journalism, but his breakthrough as a writer came after he had left the Potteries. At the age of 21 he left his father's practice and went to London as a solicitor's clerk. Bennett suffered from a stammer, which Somerset Maugham described as making it "painful to watch the struggle he had sometimes to get the words out." Maugham, who also suffered from a stammer, speculated that "except for the stammer which forced him to introspection, Arnold would never have become a writer." In 1923 Bennett won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Riceyman Steps. Memorial above his ashes in Burslem Cemetery Bennett died of typhoid at his home in Baker Street, London, on 27 March 1931, after returning from a visit to Paris where, in defiance of a waiter's advice, he had drunk tap water in a restaurant. His ashes are buried in Burslem Cemetery. His death is believed to have been one of the last occasions when the practice of spreading straw in the street to dull the sound of traffic outside the home of a dying person was carried out in London. Bennett's daughter, Virginia (Mary) Bennett/Eldin (1926-2003), lived in France and was President of the Arnold Bennett Society.