Riceyman Steps (Penguin Modern Classics) - Tapa blanda

Edited with an Introduction by Edward Mendelson and Robert Squillace - 'The Bennett novels stand up to anything Europe has put out'. Elizabeth Bowen Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness, long disguised as procrastination, can become a fatal illness. Bennett's bleak story is saved, however, by the Earlforward's maid Elsie: buxom, warm, ignorant and sublime in her spontaneous greed for life. "Riceyman Steps" is a modernist masterpiece; a profound psychological and symbolic exploration of the forces of love and death. This edition contains "Riceyman Steps", appearing here in Bennett's corrected version, and its sequel, "Elsie and the Child".

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was one of the most versatile, ambitious and successful British novelists of the early 20th century. His novels and short stories both celebrate and deplore a rapidly changing Britain. Much of his greatest work is set where he grew up, in the Potteries of the West Midlands. Inspired by Zola and Maupassant, he realized that this world of brutal industrial work and rapid social change, religious severity and material temptation, was the perfect backdrop for everything from comedy to tragedy. He died of typhoid.