The Price of Love

by Arnold Bennett

In the evening dimness of old Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room stood the
youthful virgin, Rachel Louisa Fleckring.

Genres: Novels, Classics

316 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.

Reviews

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Social commentary, crime, mystery and love thrown into a pot and stirred.

Here’s a hint: look at the title, it says a lot. The title can be interpreted in numerous ways. Only on completing the novel is the author’s meaning clear. Hint number two—Bennett is an author of the realist school!

Set at the turn of the 20th century in Bursley, one of the five, or if we stick to reality, six towns of the Staffordshire Potteries, this story by Bennett circles around an elderly woman, her two grandnephews and her housekeeper, home companion. The two women have become strongly attached, despite their short acquaintance of merely three weeks. The elderly woman is seventy-two, her young companion is twenty-two and of the two nephews, one is twenty-three and the other twenty-five. The young girl falls in love with one of them.

There have been burglaries in the town. Money is stolen….or has it been mislaid?! Who is guilty? Are perhaps several guilty? Who is at fault?

We come to know each of the characters, in and out, their strengths and their weaknesses. None can be properly judged until we know them through and through. There is a wonderfully drawn charwoman and the elderly woman’s legal councilor to be considered too. Who has done what and how is the knot to be unraveled.

I like the complexity of the story, the knot to be unraveled is not simple. One’s view of the characters varies as one observes what they do. The ending is a bit too sweet for me, but actually I do see it as being quite realistic. One might want more of a statement made, but what is delivered is reality. One must keep in mind the young age of the couple.

As a work of historical fiction, by that I mean an accurate description of a time and place, the book is superb. It is chockful of colorful, curious and intriguing details—about clothes, house plans and interior design, financial dealings, food and meals and what is proper and not proper depending on one’s social standing. Examples follow. It is not important that front steps stay clean, but rather that they are thoroughly cleaned every day. A charwoman may never ever enter the parlor. The means by which one lights the gas reveals one’s social standing. At night, blinds are to be drawn and doors securely locked, although by day they are left open. I find such information interesting.

A free download of the story is available at Librivox, here: https://librivox.org/the-price-of-lov... It is narrated by Christine Blachford. Her tone of voice is flat and her speed varies, which is a pain. Yeah, I could hear the words, but I did not really enjoy the narration, so I have given it two stars. It’s OK.

Good story, but rather tame, when viewed as a whole at the end.

************************
*Anna of the Five Towns 4 stars
*Riceyman Steps 4 stars
*Helen with the High Hand - An Idyllic Diversion 4 stars
*The Old Wives' Tale 4 stars
*The Card: A Story of Adventure in the Five Towns 4 stars
*Buried Alive 4 stars
*Clayhanger 3 stars
*The Grand Babylon Hotel 3 stars
*Hilda Lessways reading 3 stars
*The Price of Love 3 stars
*A Great Man 2 stars

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Wonderful things happen."

Rachel Louise Fleckering finds herself falling in love with the nephew of her employer. She works for Mrs. Maldon as a housekeeper/companion. Mrs. Maldon who is 70 something, with amazing jet black hair and a kind face hesitates to tell Rachel that her nephew "has a flaw".

He's a bounder. A petty thief that has already been thrown out of a bank, an auto dealer and soon from his present employer for embezzling! Mrs Maldon wants to warn Rachel, but also wants to believe the best about Louis. She manages to warn Rachel not to get involved with Louis but then falls into a coma from an arterial stroke. Alas, her advice is unheeded. She dies.

At the very moment of her last breath Louis is proposing to Rachel and they hear her very death rattle while having their first kiss. Creepy, right? Arnold Bennett is a masterful writer and his prose and juxtapositions are nothing short of magnificent.

One of my favorite chapter endings, as an example of his prose, goes thusly...

"And the soft darkness and the wind, and the faint sky reflections of distant
furnace fires, and the sense of the road winding upward, and the very
sense of the black mass of the house in front of her (dimly lighted at
the upper floor) all made part of her mysterious happiness."

You have to fall into this book as if you were living in the the early 1900's. Just as cars were replacing horses. Before houses had electricity and lamps were lit with gas. This book portrays all of that and more. The intimate details of life during such a genuinely nascent period are as fascinating as the People of Walmart.

The characters are well drawn and the message of the book translates into any century. Love has a price. Do you pay the price? I found myself liking Louis despite his petty larceny. Or, maybe even because of it.

Bennett successfully endowed his main characters with flaws, idiosyncrasies, a familiar nincompoopery cravenness and the all-out theater of puffed up, self-righteousness; but also the magnanimity, nobility and solidarity, the entangled kinship of being simply human.

He writes to the truth and it is a warm, hot truth that tastes like a sweet, sour, tarty, lovely rhubarb pie. With ice cream.

I think Bennett unsuccessfully imbued Rachel with a quasi-religious sacrificial sense, as his last sentence reads

..."And as, slightly raising her confident chin
in the street, she thus undertook to pay the price of love, there was
something divine about Rachel's face.

But, having met Rachel previously in the book, I couldn't quite get the feels for that.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Arnold Bennett’s writing, so it’s difficult for me to give this book a mere 3 stars, but I base it on what I like in a book.
The 3 stars are because I don’t care for the overly sentimental nature of the heroine’s ultimate decision. I’m not like that, although 4 decades ago, I could have more easily been. I like to admire my leading ladies!
I realize she didn’t have many options, especially if she didn’t want to actually fall back a class to a working woman. She liked the status of being someone who HIRES the working class people.
Her sense of loyalty is fierce with her husband and unconditional love to a fault can have benefits in a marriage. Staying for the sake of keeping the status of married woman? Sadly, I have seen this backfire IRL, where the wife stays no matter how much the man disappoints her, over & over again for almost 40 years now. She has been emotionally and socially handicapped by her choice; but it’s her son who has paid a worse price as he hasn’t been given a choice to stay or go due to disabling medical conditions. This is not only the ‘Price of Love’, but the price of having limited choices in this era.
Disentangling myself from a 12 year relationship wasn’t easy, but I’m certainly proud of my accomplishment. Then I think - did our heroine have the same resources to fall back on? No, of course she wasn’t a homeowner (at least not feme sole) and she lacked a college degree and a career allowing her to support herself.
Two last things: I’m so thankful I didn’t live in this period of civilization; second - hindsight is Crystal clear.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't like the ending much, so I knocked off a star: but the wonderful detail of life in the Potteries at the turn of the century is just so readable - who knew that lighting the gas with a spill or with a taper could represent a social divide!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Naive girl marries ne'er-do-well dandy. Girl struggles with disillusionment. Girl struggles with patriarchal society. Girl accepts fate and sacrifices self to unworthy husband. This book could be accused of every cliche, but I couldn't help liking it. Perhaps it was meant to be traditional and moralistic, but it had strong moments of emotional realism and elicited honest sympathy for quietly interesting characters.

[Redbird · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bennett writes insightfully about interpersonal communications, internal struggles, and gender differences. He can be witty, silly, or rather subtly humorous. This novel focuses much more on the emotional toll of a relationship built on deceit and superficiality. The main relationship portrays the subtleties of verbal abuse and the tremendous impact it has.
Less fun to read but a good book and well written.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know the Bloomsbury crowd was down on Arnold Bennett and no one reads him anymore, but he is my favorite writer of this era. Other writers blow hot and cold but all of his books have been good, and this one was exceptional. This novel has all the emotionality and wide view of life of The Old Wives Tale, but also a cracking good plot. I had no idea what the hell was going to happen next in this book. An elderly lady in Bursely has two nephews to whom she is planning to leave her money, and a new young companion. One of the nephews has a fine character but no social skills or sense of humor. The other is charming and handsome but dishonest and unreliable, and he’s in hot water because he’s embezzled all the petty cash at his job and he knows his boss is planning to look at the books. The elderly lady has dropped a big bundle of money in the house and the dishonest nephew finds it. He tells himself he’s going to give it to his aunt later, but at the same time he’s also planning to take it. Then his aunt falls ill—because she’s realized her money is missing and she’s so upset. While the nephew is looking at the money and thinking things over, the companion bursts in asking him to call for the doctor, so he sticks the money in the first place he thinks of—the grate in the fireplace.

Anyway, there were a lot of things in this book that reminded me of The Old Wives Tale, aside from being set in Bursely, like the touching relationship between the elderly aunt and the young companion, who admire each other but also look down on each other. In the middle of a crisis in the early morning, one of the characters sees the lamplighter come down the street and light the lamps and she’s struck by the secret nighttime world, just the way Sam Povey is amazed to see the bakery during his early-morning crisis. And the young companion will marry a complete no-goodnik despite everything people do to try and stop her, just like Sophia Baines. Bennett describes everything so well and gets into people’s minds so thoroughly and sympathetically. I’m bummed because there’s no Bennett book for 1915—apparently he was too busy as wartime Director of Propaganda for France.

[Jean Boobar · Rating 2 out of 5]

A silly farce, entertaining but not much more. Features two young heirs of an elderly woman and the caregiver she hired.

[Dianne Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic. I'm so wishing there were a sequel!