Mary Webb (March 25, 1881 – October 8, 1927), was an English
romantic novelist of the early 20th century, whose novels are set chiefly in the Shropshire
countryside and among Shropshire characters and people which she knew and loved well.
Life
She was born Gladys Mary Meredith in the Shropshire village of Leighton, 13 km southeast of Shrewsbury. Her father was a
schoolteacher, who inspired his daughter with his own love of literature and the local countryside. On her mother's side she was
descended from a family related to Sir Walter Scott. Mary loved to explore the countryside
around her home, and developed a gift of detailed observation and description, of both people and places, which infuses her
poetry and prose.
At the age of 20 she developed symptoms of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder (which resulted in bulging protuberant eyes and a throat goitre), and was the cause of ill health throughout her life and probably contributed to her early death. This
affliction gave her great sympathy with the suffering, and finds its fictional counterpart in the disfiguring harelip of Prue Sarn, the heroine of Precious Bane.
In 1912 she married Henry Webb, a teacher who at first supported her literary interests. They lived for a time in
Weston-super-Mare, before moving back to Mary's beloved Shropshire where they worked
as market gardeners until Henry secured a job as a teacher at the Priory School.
The couple lived briefly in Rose Cottage near the village of Pontesbury between the years
1914 and 1916, during which time she wrote The Golden Arrow.[1] Her time in the village was commemorated in 1957 by the opening of the Mary Webb
School[2]
The publication of The Golden Arrow" in 1917 enabled them to live at Lyth Hill, a place which Mary loved, buying a plot of
land and building Spring Cottage.
In 1921 they moved to London hoping that she would be able to achieve greater
literary recognition. This, however, did not happen. By 1927 she was suffering increasingly bad health, her marriage was failing,
and she returned to Shropshire alone. She died at St Leonards on Sea, aged 46.
In her own lifetime, although she was acclaimed by John Buchan and by Rebecca West, who hailed her as a genius, and won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse for Precious Bane,
she won little respect from the general public. It was only after her death that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Stanley
Baldwin, earned her posthumous success through his approbation, referring to her as a neglected genius at a Literary Fund
dinner in 1928. As a result, her collected works were republished in a standard edition by Jonathan Cape, becoming best sellers in the 1930s and running into many editions.
Though her work is still well-loved by fans, it is currently out of fashion and only two of her novels are in print. Her
writing is notable for its descriptions of nature, and of the human heart. She has a deep sympathy for all her characters and is
able to see good and truth in all of them. At the same time, the apparent unremitting gloom of some of her work does not appeal
to all readers, and was all too easily ridiculed by other writers. The most successful of these parodies, Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm parodying Mary's
The house in Dormer Forest, became a bestseller in its own right.
The museum at the Tourist Information Centre in Much Wenlock includes a lot of
information on Mary Webb including a display of photographs of the filming of her novel Gone to Earth in 1950.
Her cottage on Lyth Hill can still be seen, but much extended and modernised.
Works
- The Spring of Joy (Essays and Poems) (published 1917)
- The Golden Arrow (1916)
- Gone to Earth (1917)
- The House in Dormer Forest (1920)
- Seven For A Secret (1922)
- Precious Bane (1924)
- Armour Wherein He Trusted (unfinished)
Dramatic adaptations
Gone to Earth is the story of Hazel Woodus, a child of nature with a pet fox who simply wants to be herself, living
among the remote Shropshire hills of the Welsh Marches with her harpist coffin-building
father, but gets drawn into the world of normal human relationships through her great beauty, marrying a local church minister,
but also becoming the object of the local fox-hunting squire's obsessive love for her. She casts herself down a mineshaft to
escape, clutching her beloved fox. Gone to Earth was filmed in 1950 by
Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger, starring Jennifer Jones as Hazel Woodus. However, it was later
re-edited, shortened and retitled for its American release, and fell into relative obscurity. In 1985 the full 110-minute
restored version was released by the National Film Archive, to great acclaim.
Precious Bane is set in the years after the Battle of Waterloo, and tells
the story of Prue Sarn, disfigured by a harelip which her superstitious neighbours
regard as a sign that she is a witch, and how she falls in love with a visiting weaver,
Kester Woodseaves. It was produced as a television play by the BBC in 1989, with Janet McTeer as Prue, Clive Owen as her brother Gideon, and
John Bowe as Kester. It was first produced as a television play by French Television (ORTF) in
1968, with Dominique Labourier as Prue, Josep Maria Flotats as Gedeon and Pierre Vaneck as Kester; the director was Claude
Santelli; the title was 'Sarn' (French translation for the title of the novel).
References
- ^ Mary Coles, Gladys (1990). Mary Webb. Stroud: Seren Books. ISBN
1-85411-034-9.
- ^ About us. The Mary Webb School and Science College. Retrieved on 2007-10-17.
External links
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