Riceyman Steps (Unabridged) (Annotated)

Set in the shabby precincts of Clerkenwell after the First World War, Riceyman Steps is a taut study of possession, deprivation, and moral constriction. Its central figure, Henry Earlforward, a miserly second-hand bookseller, marries the widow Violet Arb in a union shadowed less by romance than by economy, appetite, and fear. Bennett's prose is characteristically exact: domestic objects, bodily ha...