Riceyman Steps

Name: Riceyman Steps
Rating: 3.7 (3 reviews)
Author: Unknown Author
ISBN: 9780486843469

by Unknown Author

3.7

(3 ratings)

304 pages2020Dover Publications, IncorporatedISBN 9780486843469

Fiction

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About this book

Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after. It quickly becomes clear that his miserliness, his “grand passion and vice,” has rubbed off on Violet, threatening her chances at happiness just as much as his. His obsession also imperils Elsie’s ability to help her lover Joe, who returned from World War I with shell shock, and who desperately needs her. The year it was published Riceyman Steps won the <a href="https://standardebooks.org/collections/james-tait-black-memorial-fiction-prize-winners">James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction</a>. Its tragic tone represents a departure from many of the novels and stories <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/arnold-bennett">Arnold Bennett</a> set in the “Five Towns,” the fictional location inspired by his Staffordshire childhood. Instead, it reflects the pain and disappointment of the years immediately following the Great War. As Earlforward tells a customer early on, “We’re not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven’t been straight since 1914.”

Publication Details

Publisher: Dover Publications, Incorporated
Published: 2020
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780486843469

About Unknown Author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English novelist, playwright, and journalist, whose novels and plays generally reflected middle-class life in north Staffordshire. He was born in Hanley, Staffordshire (which is now Stoke-on-Trent), the son of a solicitor. He was educated in Newcastle-under-Lyme. After school, he worked for his father, and in his spare time he was a journalist. At age twenty-one, he moved to London to work as a solicitor's clerk. In 1889 he won a writing competition in *Tit-Bits* magazine and decided to become a full-time journalist. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical *Woman*, for which he also began writing serial fiction. His first novel, *A Man from the North*, was published in 1898, the same year he became the editor of *Woman*. In 1900 he left the magazine and moved to Hockliffe, Bedfordshire, to become a full-time writer. In 1903 he moved to join the artist community in Paris, where he wrote several novels and plays. In 1908 he published *The Old Wives' Tale*, which was a best-seller. He visited to America in 1911 on a much-publicized trip. His excellent detective fiction includes *The Loot of Cities* (1905), six stories about Cecil Thorold, a rogue-detective millionaire "in search of joy' and not above blackmail and theft to corral his criminals. [Leslie S. Klinger, *In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes* (2011)] During World War I he was Director of Propaganda for France at the Ministry of Information. He refused a knighthood in 1918. In 1922 he separated from his French wife and fell in love with the actress Dorothy Cheston, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. He died of typhoid at his home in London in 1931.