Mary Gladys Meredith Webb (1881–1927)

As soon as I started this novel, I was very aware this must have been the book that inspired Stella Gibbons' parody, 'Cold Comfort Farm.'
Featuring the aptly named Darke family of Dormer House: stern father Solomon; mother Rachel, who spends her evenings tearing rags to shreds; their four adult children, all named after precious stones as their mother 'had been so bored by the advent of each child...that she had refused to think of any names for them', leaving the Rector, an authority on show more gems, to do so. With them live distant relative Catherine - outwardly lovely but malicious - and Rachel's mother, Mrs Velindre, undoubtedly the inspiration for Gibbons' Aunt Ada Doom.
' "Let us pray", said Solomon, and they all went down, with more or less grace, on to their knees.
When the others knelt, grandmother remained seated, like a stone idol which is immune, through its very stoniness, from human movement. It was understood that grandmother could not kneel. Only grandmother and her Creator knew that not her knees but her pride of years deterred her from this religious exercise...This remaining upright amidst a grovelling family gave her a satiric glee.'

Amid the at times quite comic family, and the more serious romantic plots involving the young people, Webb immerses us in lengthy paeans to the countryside and religion, some of which left me quite baffled:
'Enoch was never quite at his ease at Dormer. He liked to be out on the huge purple hills under the towering sky, where the curlews cried out strange news to him in passing, and the little brown doves murmured of a hidden country, a secret law, more limited than those of man, yet more miraculous. For there, to dream a nest is to build it. To desire the sea, or an orange tree in Africa is to obtain it. Genius and love are the nearest approach we have made to this wholly mysterious life...'
There's a LOT of this.
Over-the-top gothic melodrama; not recommended. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I recently discovered Mary Webb through her best-known work, "Precious Bane." While "Gone to Earth" also has the lush and lyrical natural descriptions, it is not as compelling because its main character, Hazel Woodus, is not a well rounded figure with clear desires and thoughts, unlike Prue Sarn in "Precious Bane," who is fully realized and fleshed out.

Hazel lives in a glade with her father, a beekeeper and coffin maker, but takes after her deceased mother, who is described as a gypsy with show more a dark, wild soul (or something like that). The implication is that Hazel is her purest self when close to nature, a sort of elemental child of the earth. Trouble comes along when two men, the preacher Edward and the squire Reddin, both become obsessed with Hazel. The story plays out a bit like "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" but told from a woman's perspective, the moral of the story being (thank you, "Breakfast at Tiffany's") that you "can't tame a wild thing."

For me the problem is that Hazel never progresses beyond the status of a "wild thing," a manic pixie dreamgirl without any other qualities than her intense love of nature, pagan urges, and protection of injured and vulnerable animals. She is so passive about her relationships with men that she becomes more of a symbol and not a person (this bugs me about Tess, too).

Webb is pretty frank about sex, franker than Hardy without being at all explicit, and I think part of the message she is trying to get across is that both Hazel's relationships are unfulfilling because each is missing an essential part. Reddin is sexually attractive and obsesses her, but she doesn't get any enjoyment out of their relationship because he is emotionally and physically abusive and wants to tame her. Edward seems to try and understand her wild soul and wants to let her be herself, but he's too afraid of taking her innocence away to actually consummate their marriage.

It is the setup for a wonderfully tragic story, but Hazel herself wasn't compelling enough to bring everything together for me. Still, it is gorgeously written and immersive in the world of rural Shropshire, and I look forward to reading more of Webb's novels. show less

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 show more 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. show less