Riceyman Steps

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story.

Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

About the Author

Arnold Bennett was born in Hanley, Staffordshire, in 1867. After a secondary school education, he worked first for his father, a self-taught solicitor, and then moved to London as a shorthand clerk with a firm of solicitors. He began to write to make extra money and in 1893 became assistant editor and subsequently editor of the weekly magazine, Woman, reviewing books and writing articles on general subjects, something he continued to do all his life.

His first novel, A Man From the North, appeared in 1898 and in 1900 he finished The Grand Babylon Hotel, published in 1902, and began Anna of the Five Towns (1902), in which he first started to use the Potteries of his boyhood as a setting for his novels. In these contrasting works, he also reveals his lifelong fascination for, on the one hand, the world's luxury and opulence, and on the other, puritanism and people who can endure hard work.

In 1903 Bennett moved to Paris and in 1907 he married a Frenchwoman (from whom he separated in 1921). The Old Wives' Tale (1908) was written in France and shows Bennet's main influences, the first being that of his own background and the second that of the French realists such as Flaubert, Maupassant and Balzac. In it, Bennett also reveals his own preoccupations with the effects of time and history on the lives of ordinary people.

This was followed by the Clayhanger trilogy: Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911) and These Twain (1916). His works also include several plays, two volumes of short stories and several other novels. He died in 1931.