These Twain

Edwin Clayhanger and Hilda are married at last, and the novel is about the years after: the house, the stepson, the money, and two people who cannot stop being who they were. Bennett finished the Clayhanger trilogy in 1916, and this is the volume where the Five Towns realism turns entirely inward. Nothing dramatic happens and the marriage is completely convincing. Fifty-seven plates of Sickert and Clausen, from music-hall stages to fields and ricks, hold the quiet, inward English life of the marriage alongside Bennett's prose.