Set between the Staffordshire Potteries and Paris, The Old Wives' Tale traces the bifurcating lives of Constance and Sophia Baines from youthful shop assistants to old age, through marriage, commerce, flight, and loss. Bennett's spacious realism - precise in material detail, steady in pace, and quietly psychological - turns the ordinary into event. Moving from Bursley's drapery to the 1870-71 Siege of Paris, the novel makes time its protagonist. Within the Edwardian realist tradition and in dialogue with Balzac and Flaubert, it builds moral insight by accumulation. Born in Hanley in the heart of the Five Towns and later resident in Paris, Arnold Bennett fused provincial intimacy with cosmopolitan observation. Journalism disciplined his eye for process - how shops run, money moves, reputations harden. A Parisian glimpse of an aged woman, he said, sparked the inquiry into who she had been. Readers who value breadth of social vision and humane exactness will relish this novel's patient artistry. It rewards admirers of Balzacian panorama and Trollopian society, and it offers a vital counterpoint to modernist caricatures of Bennett. A classic of English realism, it deepens with every return. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable-distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.