I ended up feeling much the same way about Hilda Lessways as I did of Edwin Clayhanger. Both are hard to like, it is not really clear if she is a highly intelligent and perceptive woman caught in a time with no appreciation of her skills or just a wishy-washy mess. She spends most of her time swerving from one impulsive action to another. Since I already know her fate from Clayhanger, it is hard to watch her stumble her way through disasters and know it won't go well. I think this is more of the "Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short" Arnold Bennett that I was expecting. Yet, I did stick it out and I've started the third book in the series so who is the fool here?

This book runs parallel with Clayhanger, so it was a little strange knowing sort of what was going to happen, and having already read parts of it from Clayhanger's point of view. But it was still interesting and surprising seeing what Hilda is up to when she's 'offstage' in that book. She's a strange character, and I found this book a bit more concise than Clayhanger. ( )

Given its early publication date (1911) this seems a particularly imaginative companion volume to Arnold Bennett’s previous novel Clayhanger. Rather than offering us a traditional sequel, Bennett instead reviews the principal events from the earlier novel from the perspective of Hilda Lessways, and she certainly has a time of it!
Stifled in her mother’s household in the Five Towns in the late 1870s Hilda manages to break free, firstly by consulting George Cannon, a local character. While he masquerades as clerk to a local solicitor, the marvellously-named Q Karkeek, Cannon in fact runs the business, even though he is not professionally qualified. Hilda consults him, drawn principally by the oddity of his accomplice’s name, seeking advice on how to protect her own interests in a portfolio of let property scattered around the Five Towns, which she believes her mother is grievously mismanaging.
As a consequence of this initial encounter Hilda finds herself learning shorthand (an adventure in itself for a single woman in those days), and secures a post in Cannon’s alternative business venture which seeks to establish a new evening paper for distribution throughout the five towns. Meanwhile Hilda has met, and been intrigued by, local printer, Edwin Clayhanger.

Although Cannon’s journalistic aspirations subsequently peter out, Hilda finds herself enmeshed within Cannon’s business web, and ends up accompanying his half-sister, the preternaturally feeble Sarah Gailey, in the management of a boarding house in Brighton. During this period Hilda becomes increasingly deeply drawn to Cannon, despite the occasional regretful thoughts about Clayhanger. Eventually (inevitably?) Cannon marries her, whisking her away for a brief honeymoon. However, almost immediately upon their return to Brighton Hilda learns, in the most distressing of ways, that Cannon was in fact already married, to a wealthy woman living in Cornwall, and that this first marriage was never dissolved.

When confronted with this Cannon disappears, leaving Hilda alone. She returns to the Five Towns where she meets Clayhanger again, and falls even more deeply in love with him, but is unable to bring herself to tell him of her plight. Upon her return to Brighton she finds that her small personal fortune, which Cannon had invested in a new hotel venture, has been lost, and that she is pregnant. ( )

"In HILDA LESSWAYS (the second volume of the trilogy that begins with CLAYHANGER and ends with THESE TWAIN) Bennett relates the early life of Hilda Lessways, before her marriage to Edwin Clayhanger. Her involvement with the enigmatic, self-made man, George Cannon, and his enterprises takes her from the offices of an embryo newspaper in the Five Towns to a venture into the guesthouse business in Brighton."

"As in CLAYHANGER Bennett, in Walter Allen's words, `follows the grain of life'. Hilda, in her guilt at having failed her mother, in her relationship with Cannon, in her growing fascination for young Clayhanger, in the reality of her hopes and tragedies, is one of Bennett's most living heroines."