The Old Wives Tale deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, through the period of separation and quite different lives, into old age. It covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Paris and Burslem, a town in the Potteries district of North Staffordshire.