An unintentionally funny romance. Some sort of ripoff of Hardy, whom I adore. But it pulled me along. ( )

Precious Bane has a fairytale quality, partly evoked by Webb's descriptions of the Shropshire landscape and the dragonflies in Spring, partly by the dialect, and partly by young narrator/protagonist whose shining goodness does not protect her from the sorrows of the world. ( )

Such a beautiful book...the language is breathtaking, the characters magnificient, a book I will turn to again and again ( )

2468 Precious Bane, by Mary Webb (read 16 Oct 1992) This is 1924 novel which I found a tremendous read! It is set in Shropshire about 1815 and tells a somber story, laden with dialect (but one gets used to it), and telling of customs long gone--bull baiting, sin eating, hiring fairs, etc. Prue Sarn has a hare lip and is sister to Gidean, whose "bane" is to make money and be a great man. This suggests more social mobility than I thought anyone aspired to in the England of that time. Gidean is a repulsive person, but Prue is a very good person and her "weaver," Kester Woodeaves, .is likewise a person one admires. Their love is touching, and one feels greatly for Prue. This is a forgotten novel, as Mary Webb is a forgotten novelist, or so I thought when I read it, though it is mentioned, for instance, in the 1962 edition of Good Reading. ( )

My interest in Mary Webb is partly because she's a Virago Modern Classics author, but also because she's a Shropshire lass. It was a little hard to get past the thought that Mary Webb's books were a big inspiration for Stella Gibbons' wonderfully funny Cold Comfort Farm, but this novel is no sillier than anything by Thomas Hardy. Webb, like Hardy, writes about country folk, their daily lives and their superstitions. Although she uses Shropshire dialect, the story and characters are far less melodramatic than I'd imagined.

The heroine of the book is Prue Sarn, a strong and intelligent girl with a 'hare-shotten' lip, which everyone assumes will preclude her from having a lover, husband or children. Her brother Gideon is driven by work and the desire to become rich. At his father's funeral he performs the task of sin-eater - pawning his own soul in exchange for the running of his mother's farm.

In one electrifying scene, Prue appears in front of the wizard Beguildy and two men (one of whom is weaver Kester Woodseaves, with whom Prue is secretly in love), naked, in the raising of Venus. Originally the part of Venus was to have been played by Gideon's sweetheart Jancis, but Prue offers herself in her stead, because unlike Jancis Prue has no lover, nor - as Jancis reminds her, to Prue's fury - is she ever likely to have one. As she dances naked, her face and hare-lip are hidden, but Prue is fully aware of the power of her naked body to inspire helpless lust in men. It's a feeling she enjoys, though she is bitter because she thinks they would recoil if they saw her face.

Without wishing to give away too much of the story, it's enough to say that tragedy follows tragedy, as though Gideon is indeed cursed. There's an inevitability about his death. To Prue, the manner of it seems a fitting end "to a life which so cut itself adrift from all pleasant, feckless human ways and doings. He belonged to none, seemingly, for he gave the go-by to his nearest kin. What he had most truck with was the earth and the water from which he was building himself a life to his mind." To some of her neighbours, though, it is Prue herself who is seen as the cursed one, and one of them whips up feeling against her that climaxes in an attack on her.

The book is at heart, I think, a love story, and a story about finding beauty and contentment in what one has. Prue is a virtuous girl, but she doesn't pass judgement on others. Her heart is genuinely big, which is precisely what Kester Woodseaves sees - not her hare-shotten lip or the curse it is supposed to represent. [April 2005] ( )