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Precious Bane (Virago modern classics) by…
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Precious Bane (Virago modern classics) (original 1924; edition 1978)

by Mary Webb

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8983123,567 (4.06)113
'She has a style of exquisite beauty; which yet has both force and restraint, simplicity and subtlety; she has fancy and wit, delicious humour and pathos. She sees and knows men aright as no other novelist does. She has, In short, genius' Mr. Edwin Pugh
Member:bobbyl
Title:Precious Bane (Virago modern classics)
Authors:Mary Webb
Info:Virago Press Ltd (1978), Edition: New edition, Paperback, 288 pages
Collections:Your library, Favorites
Rating:*****
Tags:Classic, DIK

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Precious Bane by Mary Webb (1924)

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» See also 113 mentions

English (29)  French (2)  All languages (31)
Showing 1-5 of 29 (next | show all)
Great story set in rural England of Shropshire somewhat like Wuthering Heights with brooding farmers and a kind woman afflicted with a deformity who is seeking love. Nature seems to reflect the feelings of characters. Really good. ( )
  kslade | Dec 8, 2022 |
In beautiful, simple and straightforward language, this book tells the story of characters in a small town in Western England, in the first part of the 19th century. Ignorance runs rampant, with its companion, cruelty, in the small-knit farming community. In the Sarn family, love of money creates dishonesty and ruins lives. But, just when all seems lost and at an end for the brave, good-hearted protagonist, good prevails. Heart-warming. ( )
  burritapal | Oct 23, 2022 |
Better than I expected. I do love a good anti-capital book. ( )
  galuf84 | Jul 27, 2022 |
Mary Webb and Precious Bane came at me utterly by surprise. I had never heard of her or of the book until a friend of mine spoke very often, in the week or so that we were going through her books, of her strong and early love for Mary Webb, and particularly for the protagonist in PB, Prue Sarn. Eventually I decided to take the book and see for myself.

Although published in 1924, the book has an older feel to me. Webb lived in Shropshire and writes of the poor farmers who lived there. She writes in a beautiful dialect, easy to read and yet filled with words that were new to me but whose meaning were clear from the context. I don’t know exactly when this is set but there are no motorcars, no planes, and life is lived according to season and weather and custom.

Prue is born with a harelip. The folk belief is that a hare looked at her mother when she was carrying Prue in her womb, and because of that she has her slight deformity. She is said to be a witch because of it, tho' it is mostly the unkind gossip of a few rather than the grim belief of the many. But even those who love her know that she will never marry because of her harelip. And though she wishes for her own wifely life, she has no great hopes. Not even when she meets the new Weaver.

Prue's father dies early in the story and the farm falls to her brother Gideon. He sets his eye on a grand house in town and the desire to gain that house and go to the Hunt ball with his wife and in every way command the respect of the people around him. So he works himself and his sister, Prue, nearly to death to achieve that aim. But she has agreed to the dream and to the work and although she disapproves or worries at times about her brother, she is fond of him and works as hard as he.

I’ll say no more of the plot, and here I give you very little — just the beginning. I’ll turn back, instead, to the writing.

As she moves through the days of her life Prue gives great attention to the natural world around her, and her pleasure in it is a deep pleasure to this reader. It is as if I have spent weeks in her world, that I know the countryside almost as well as she does, that I have felt the sun and the rain and seen the mist and shared her joy in everything. I have even gotten to look over her shoulder as she writes in her journal in the attic.

The unhurried unfolding of what is in the main a rich and joyful tale, despite whatever tragedy comes along, is a rare and wonderful gift. This hurried world we live in, where the pace of writing is meant to be breakneck much of the time and tense the rest, seldom permits such a gentle character to truly have her voice. But Webb does so with Prue. She is the unforward, uncritical narrator who observes so well and forgives so much, who allows herself her own quiet world and ways, and who never suspects that she is the protagonist of her own tale. ( )
1 vote thesmellofbooks | May 17, 2022 |
Spoiler Alert

It’s a long time since I’ve read Thomas Hardy to whose work, Mary Webb’s Precious Bane is often compared, but the novel only feels Hardyesque insofar as it involves a nineteenth-century agrarian community steeped in superstition and in its abundant lyrical descriptions of nature. Far more than Hardy’s, Webb’s characters seem like figures from some ancient ballad, more types than fully fleshed-out people, and her plot is a simple one.

The story opens sometime in the 1820s with the sudden death of the main characters’—Prue and her elder brother Gideon Sarn’s—father. At the old man’s funeral, Gideon agrees to be his father’s sin eater (one who ritually takes on the sins of the dead) in exchange for full control of the farm at Sarn Mere. Handsome, hard, and singleminded, Gideon is grimly determined to work the land. His goal is to purchase, within a few years, the ageing squire’s mansion in Lullingford, a market town fifteen miles away, where he will bring the beautiful Jancis Beguildy as his wife. Prue, cursed with a harelip—thought to be caused by her mother’s encountering a hare in the woods during her pregnancy—will, of course, never marry due to her disfigurement. She pledges to help her brother on the land, and is assured by him that she, too, will one day live a life of ease in his fine Lullingford house.

At the “love-spinning” for Gideon and Jancis—a gathering at which local women spin the wool that will be woven into fabric for the young couple—Prue first sees the weaver, Kester Woodeaves. He’s a powerfully handsome figure, but her attraction, the reader is told, transcends the physical. In those first mystical moments, he becomes her “master” and his image and spirit will infuse her thoughts in the hard days ahead. In time, Prue will save his life, and he will ultimately save hers.

In the end, Webb’s story is one of fanatical greed being punished. Jancis Beguildy’s father, the local wizard who provides charms and snake-oil cures and who may be in league with the devil, is known to have held a long grudge against Old Sarn, and he has even less use for the man’s son, Gideon. Idle and amoral, Beguildy is motivated by lust for easy money. He believes he can get a better price for his beautiful daughter, Jancis, than Gideon is likely to give, and he is fully prepared to auction her off to the highest bidder. When Gideon sleeps with the girl to stake his claim to her, however, the young man cements his fate. Beguildy’s curses and revenge will deprive him of all he’s worked for.

Webb’s characters and their motivations are not complex. Neither is her plot. Her story’s strength lies in its rich and poetic telling. My copy of this book sat on the shelf for years. I tried it several times, but, until now, none seemed the right one to wrestle with the thick dialect. I wish there had been an annotated copy available, complete with a glossary of Shropshire English. The meaning of some but not all of the vocabulary can be inferred, and initially I made regular use of an online dictionary of Shropshire dialect and the Oxford English Dictionary to understand some of the more opaque words and phrases. I did not find the book easy going until I was about three-quarters of the way in.

I’m glad I finally read Precious Bane, but I wasn’t as enchanted as others are or as I thought I’d be. That’s largely due, I think, to the simple, unnuanced characters: Gideon is too greedy and driven; Beguildy, too bald-facedly bad; golden-haired Jancis, too insipidly pretty; Prue and Kester’s love story, too fanciful. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief in the latter for more than a minute or two. ( )
1 vote fountainoverflows | Oct 12, 2020 |
Showing 1-5 of 29 (next | show all)
And yet, having said all that – I loved Precious Bane. Yes, the novel is fatalistic. Yes, there's too much "loam and lovechild" storytelling. Yes, the narrator's choice of expression is sometimes unintentionally hilarious. (Prue's biblical exclamation "The maister have come!" – this being uttered whenever Kester, the weaver, appears – had the unfortunate effect of popping into my head whenever my own other half emerged from his study requesting tea, etc.)
Nonetheless, Precious Bane is well worth pursuing. ... For me, this was what lifted Precious Bane above any Hardy novel I've read. The commentary on life just seemed more rounded, more able to take in joy as well as pain (and able, too, to explore the relationship between the two states).
That I liked it more got me thinking, too – for the first time since I've started reading the VMC series – about why Hardy is firmly ensconced in the "canon" and Webb isn't. Is it about gender, or is there something I'm missing?
added by KayCliff | editGuardian, Eloise Millar (Mar 10, 2009)
 

» Add other authors (9 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Mary Webbprimary authorall editionscalculated
Baldwin, StanleyIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Guéritte, Madeleine T.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Hilder, RowlandIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Dedication
To my dear H.B.L.W.
First words
Foreword
To conjure, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is in the past is like trying to gather in one's arms the hyacinthine colour of the distance.
It was at a love-spinning that I saw Kester first.
Quotations
THE TRAVELLERS' LIBRARY A series of books ... designed for the pocket ... Though the volumes measure only 7 inches by 4 3/4 inches, the page is arranged so that the margins are not unreasonably curtailed nor legibility sacrificed. The books are of a uniform thickness irrespective of the number of pages, and the paper, specially manufactured for the series, is remarkably opaque, even when it is thinnest.
"I dearly like pretty china," I said. "Can we get some of them new cups and saucers from Staffordshire, with little people on 'em?"
A tremendous blue day it was, with a sky like a dark bowl, Worcester china colour.
For when the nut-hatch comes into her own tree, she dunna ask who planted it, nor what name it bears among men. For the tree is all to the nut-hatch, and this was all to me.
It was a wonderful thing to see our meadows at Sarn when the cowslip was in blow. Gold-over they were, so that you would think not even an angel's feet were good enough to walk there. You could make a tossy-ball before a thrush had gone over his song twice, for you'd only got to sit down and gather with both hands. Every way you looked, there was nought but gold.
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Some copies of this work may be incorrectly attributed to Stanley Baldwin, as he wrote an introduction to one edition.
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'She has a style of exquisite beauty; which yet has both force and restraint, simplicity and subtlety; she has fancy and wit, delicious humour and pathos. She sees and knows men aright as no other novelist does. She has, In short, genius' Mr. Edwin Pugh

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Book description
This classic novel -- a lyrical blending of human passion with a powerful and poetic vision of nature -- has been compared by critics, since its publication in 1924, the great novels of the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy. Like Jane Eyre, like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the heroine of Precious Bane is a strong woman whose determined striving for a fuller life breaks the bonds of her confining world. Born in the wild hill country of Shropshire, Prue Sarn is cursed with a harelip. Her "precious bane" sets her apart -- from the possibility of marriage and from the superstitious villagers, who regard her as "queer, outlandish," "a witch," particularly once she learns to read and write. Resigned to a life of endless labor on her ambitious brother's farm, Prue loves two things -- the remote countryside of her birth, and, first hopelessly, then with answering passion, the weaver Kester Woodseaves.
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