Hilda Lessways

The woman Edwin Clayhanger loved and lost tells her side: a shorthand clerk in the Potteries, a boarding house in Brighton, a marriage that turns out to be no marriage at all. Arnold Bennett wrote the second Clayhanger book to run alongside the first in time rather than after it, so the same days are lived twice from opposite ends. He knew the Five Towns because he was born in them. Fifty-five plates of Victorian and Edwardian portraits, including George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson, give faces to the public world against which Hilda's private story plays out.