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The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
page 4 of 878 (00%)
and in a few weeks I settled a further point, namely, that my book
must "go one better" than "Une Vie," and that to this end it must
be the life-history of two women instead of only one. Hence, "The
Old Wives' Tale" has two heroines. Constance was the original;
Sophia was created out of bravado, just to indicate that I
declined to consider Guy de Maupassant as the last forerunner of
the deluge. I was intimidated by the audacity of my project, but I
had sworn to carry it out. For several years I looked it squarely
in the face at intervals, and then walked away to write novels of
smaller scope, of which I produced five or six. But I could not
dally forever, and in the autumn of 1907 I actually began to write
it, in a village near Fontainebleau, where I rented half a house
from a retired railway servant. I calculated that it would be
200,000 words long (which it exactly proved to be), and I had a
vague notion that no novel of such dimensions (except
Richardson's) had ever been written before. So I counted the words
in several famous Victorian novels, and discovered to my relief
that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words apiece. I
wrote the first part of the novel in six weeks. It was fairly easy
to me, because, in the seventies, in the first decade of my life,
I had lived in the actual draper's shop of the Baines's, and knew
it as only a child could know it. Then I went to London on a
visit. I tried to continue the book in a London hotel, but London
was too distracting, and I put the thing away, and during January
and February of 1908, I wrote "Buried Alive," which was published
immediately, and was received with majestic indifference by the
English public, an indifference which has persisted to this day.

I then returned to the Fontainebleau region and gave "The Old
Wives' Tale" no rest till I finished it at the end of July, 1908.
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