The Old Wives' Tale

Bennett introduces the geographical setting of the novel’s first book. The two main characters, Constance and Sophia Baines, are teenage girls who live with their parents in Bursley, a fictionalized town in central England based on the English town of Burslem, one of the “Six Towns” that incorporated to become Stoke-on-Trent. The Baines home is above their shop on St. Luke’s Square. The girls they help their mother run a draper’s shop—selling wholesale cloth for making clothes. Constance (who’s 16 years old) and Sophia (who’s 15) watch Maggie, the family’s servant, through a window. Bennett describes them as “rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; […] exquisite, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise” (42). They watch Maggie as she greets a romantic interest in the street, and their reactions highlight the difference in the two girls’ characters: Sophia is a bit swifter to judge, and Constance is more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to others—“foolishly good-natured” (44).

As Constance and Sophia return to their former activities, they hear a painful moaning outside their room: Samuel Povey, one of the shop assistants, has a toothache. (Book 1 refers to this character as “Mr.