Anna of the Five Towns (1902) depicts the severe economic and moral pressures of life in the Staffordshire Potteries in the late nineteenth century. Against the vitality and harshness of the Five Towns, Bennett's narrative is a compelling delineation of his heroine's attempts to gain freedom and independence from her father and the repressive regime of Methodism. This is the first of Bennett's novels to mark out the province of the Five Towns where much of his later fiction is set.