Anna of the Five Towns

What It's About

Anna Tellwright is the elder daughter of Ephraim Tellwright, a wealthy but miserly and domineering Methodist in the Staffordshire Potteries. On her twenty-first birthday she inherits a small fortune, though her father keeps tight control over it and over her. As Anna is courted by Henry Mynors, one of the town's most eligible men, she also becomes entangled with the affairs of her father's tenant, Titus Price, and his son Willie, whose family is sinking into financial ruin. The novel follows Anna's quiet struggle for independence and self-knowledge against the constraints of her father's authority and the rigid Methodist community around her.

Key Concepts

The novel is concerned with the deadening effect of miserliness and religious rigidity on family life, and with the narrow range of choices available to a woman of means in provincial Victorian England, where financial independence does not translate into personal freedom. It's also a study of the Potteries themselves — the industrial towns of North Staffordshire that Bennett fictionalised throughout his work — and of the social and moral pressures exerted by close-knit nonconformist religious communities.

About the Author

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist, playwright, and journalist, born in Hanley, one of the six towns making up the Staffordshire Potteries. He trained briefly as a solicitor before moving to London to pursue writing, and went on to become one of the most commercially successful British authors of his era, closely associated with realist fiction set in his native Staffordshire.