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Precious Bane (Virago Modern Classics)

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Imagine the English language as a man who had passed through life's many stages, from infancy to adulthood. This novel may then be considered to have been written in English when the language was still a young boy of thirteen. Adding a lot to its quaint charm is the novel's simple, rustic setting, as if saying that when the language was young, so was the world then. There was a sigh from everybody then, like the wind in dry bents. Even the oxen by the gate, it seemed to me, sighed as they chewed the cud."

Mary Webb: The woman whose Shropshire-inspired novels are Mary Webb: The woman whose Shropshire-inspired novels are

The gardener’s daughter was the only bridesmaid. Her father, speaking of Mary years later, said: 'She had a lovely disposition. I’ve never in all my days met anyone with a more loving heart.' Prue’s outlook on life is joyous despite her disfigurement. She is brave, smart, tender-hearted and naive. She is clever and capable of sympathy for those who are heartless and uncaring. She possesses strength and resilience that demonstrate her fortitude in affliction. She is a product of the natural world which has a mystical feeling about it. Nature has a spiritual affinity to Prue who pens such experiences in her attic space:

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

I knew that if I’d got any wisdom it was never book-learning as gave it me, but just the quietness of the attic”. Where do you think Webb suggests that wisdom comes from? As for Henry, he and his second wife Kathleen had two children and lived in London, Henry renting out Spring Cottage. He died in spectacular style, falling – or, some think, jumping – from Scafell, England’s highest peak, in 1939.

Precious Bane : Mary Webb : Free Download, Borrow, and Precious Bane : Mary Webb : Free Download, Borrow, and

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 Woodseaves. 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. Critic Hilda Addison summed up Precious Bane: "The book opens with one of those simple sentences which haunt the mind until the curiosity has been satisfied . . . It strikes a note which never fails throughout; it opens with a beauty which is justified to the last sentence." The large agonised faces in Mary Webb's book annoyed me ... I did not believe people were any more despairing in Herefordshire [sic] than in Camden Town. Rebecca West, a contemporary of Mary Webb, called her, simply, "a genius," and G. K. Chesterton, another contemporary, asserted: "the light in the stories . . . is a light not shining on the things but through them."

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She wrote her first novel, The Golden Arrow while at Weston. It is set around the Long Mynd and Stiperstones. On their return they lived at Pontesbury and at The Nills near The Stiperstones. Mary lived for a while at Roseville, Pontesbury, where she and her husband grew vegetables and flowers and she sold them in Shrewsbury market. A strict churchman might find Prue much at fault (although, in Sarn, even the parson has a book of “curious ancient prayers”). She’s as likely to look in a wizard’s book for a solution as the Bible; she is well-versed in superstitious folk-lore, and lax in her churchgoing. Yet she is also full of scripture, the created world frequently evoking, for her, biblical scenes. The lilies on the mere are “like the raiment of those men who stood with Christ upon the mountain top”, floating as if Jesus, “walking upon the water, had laid them down with His cool hands”. Being the devoted reader of British classics I am, how I've managed to miss this little gem of a book for so long I honestly don't know. But beware, my dear reader, this is not Jane Austen. This is a harsh tale, in the style of Thomas Hardy or even George Eliot, you'll see the characters you so much come to care for struggle in an unfair and prejudiced world, and you'll suffer along with them. Prue Sarn is an unlikely heroine, born with a facial disfiguration which the Fates have dictated will deny her love. But Prue has strength far beyond her handicap, and this woman, suspected of witchcraft by her fellow townspeople, rises above them all through an all-encompassing sweetness of spirit.

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