Mary Webb

Mary Gladys Webb (25 March 1881 – 8 October 1927) was an English novelist and poet whose passionate, intensely felt novels of Shropshire rural life represent one of the last flowerings of the English regional novel in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. She died in near-obscurity at forty-six, but a posthumous endorsement from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin — who praised her at a literary dinner in 1928, six months after her death — created a sudden vogue that made her a bestseller and a literary cause célèbre.

Life

Webb was born Mary Gladys Meredith in Leighton, Shropshire, the daughter of a schoolmaster. She grew up in the Shropshire countryside — the landscape of the Long Mynd, the Stiperstones, and the Severn valley that would become the setting for all her novels. At twenty she developed Graves’ disease, a thyroid condition that caused disfiguring exophthalmos (protruding eyes) and affected her health for the rest of her life. The experience of physical disfigurement deeply influenced her fiction, particularly Precious Bane, whose protagonist has a harelip.

She married Henry Bertram Law Webb, a schoolteacher, in 1912. They lived frugally in various Shropshire cottages, and Mary worked obsessively on her novels while also growing and selling flowers and produce at Shrewsbury market. She published five novels between 1916 and 1924, none of which sold well during her lifetime.

Her health declined through the 1920s. She moved to London in hopes of establishing a literary career, but the city did not suit her — she was a creature of the Shropshire countryside in every fibre. She died at a nursing home in Hampstead in October 1927, largely unknown.

Precious Bane (1924)

Webb’s masterpiece and the novel for which she is remembered. Set in early nineteenth-century Shropshire, it is narrated by Prudence Sarn, a young woman born with a harelip — a disfigurement that her superstitious community regards as a mark of the devil. Her brother Gideon is consumed by ambition to make money from their failing farm, driving himself and those around him toward catastrophe.

The novel’s power derives from three sources. First, Prue’s voice — Webb wrote the novel in Shropshire dialect, and the language is rich, musical, and convincing, drawing the reader into a world that is simultaneously beautiful and harsh. Second, the nature writing — Webb’s descriptions of the Shropshire landscape (the mere, the woods, the changing seasons) are among the finest in English fiction, achieving an almost mystical intensity. Third, the love story — Prue’s tentative, disbelieving relationship with the weaver Kester Woodseaves, who sees past her disfigurement to the person beneath, is handled with extraordinary delicacy.

The novel won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in 1925 — France’s recognition of English fiction — but sold modestly until Baldwin’s famous speech.

Gone to Earth (1917)

Webb’s second novel follows Hazel Woodus, a wild, half-feral young woman who lives with her father and her pet fox, Foxy, in the Shropshire hills. Hazel is torn between two men — the gentle minister Edward Marston and the predatory squire Jack Reddin — in a story that is simultaneously a love triangle and an allegory of the conflict between civilisation and wildness, domestication and freedom.

The novel’s climax — Hazel’s death while trying to save her fox from a hunt — is melodramatic but emotionally devastating. Jennifer Jones starred in a 1950 Powell and Pressburger film adaptation.

Other Novels

• The Golden Arrow (1916) — Webb’s debut, set in the hill country near the Stiperstones
• The House in Dormer Forest (1920) — a family saga in a Shropshire manor house
• Seven for a Secret (1922) — a pastoral romance
• Armour Wherein He Trusted (1929, unfinished, posthumous) — a medieval romance left incomplete at her death

Critical Standing

Webb’s reputation has followed an unusual trajectory. Ignored during her lifetime, she became enormously popular after Baldwin’s endorsement — a popularity that attracted critical backlash. Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is partly a parody of Webb’s passionate rural fiction (and of similar writers), and the association with parody damaged Webb’s critical standing.

Yet Webb was a far more subtle and accomplished writer than the parodies suggest. Precious Bane is a genuine masterpiece — its dialect narrative, its nature mysticism, and its treatment of physical disfigurement and social prejudice are handled with a sophistication that the “rural romance” label obscures. Hardy is the obvious comparison, but Webb’s voice is her own — more lyrical, more mystical, and more intensely connected to the natural world.

Collecting Webb

Precious Bane (1924, Jonathan Cape) in first edition with dust jacket is the key Webb collectible, bringing $200–$500. The earlier novels (Constable, Hutchinson) are scarcer but less in demand. The 1928 Jonathan Cape reissues — published after Baldwin’s endorsement, with introductions by various hands — are more common. Webb’s poetry collections and essays are rare.