SCRIBBLE
Famous Shropshire Writers Mary Webb
By Esther Dowd
“I'd laboured over it a long while, and labour brings a thing near the heart's core.” Mary Webb, Precious Bane
M
ary Webb was a British
Romantic writer whose work is chiefly set in the Shropshire countryside.
Her writing is not comfortable or unrealistic but is earthy and sometimes
A
t the age of 20, she developed symptoms of Graves'
disease, a thyroid disorder which resulted in bulging, protuberant eyes and throat goitre, which caused her ill health throughout her life. This affliction resulted
in her being empathic with the suffering of others. It finds its fictional counterpart particularly in Prue Sarn, the heroine of
harsh but with powerful and beautiful
Precious Bane who has the disfigurement of a harelip (this is not
descriptions.
only a physical affliction in the novel but a superstitious one as
If you look at reviews of Precious
Bane (her 6th novel which was published in 1924) you will read again and again similar phrases such as ‘This is the best novel I have ever read’ or ‘Precious Bane is my favourite read’. Discerning readers believe that she is on a par with Thomas Hardy and George Eliot and that she never quite got the recognition she deserved.
of
Lodge,
Shrewsbury.
countryside
8
miles
Mary
around
southeast
explored her
rom 1914 to 1916 she lived in the village of Pontesbury,
during which time she wrote The Golden Arrow. Her time in the village was commemorated in 1957 by the opening of Mary Webb School. The publication of The
Golden Arrow in 1917 enabled Mary Webb and her husband to move to Lyth Hill, Bayston Hill a place she loved, buying a plot of land and building Spring Cottage. She died at age 46 and is buried
S
in Shrewsbury, at the General Cemetery on Longden Road.
Mary Webb was born in 1881 at Leighton
F well).
the
childhood
home, and developed a sense of detailed observation and description, of both
he won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (a prize decided
by an all-female jury) for Precious Bane. After her death Stanley Baldwin, the then Prime Minister, brought about her commercial success through his admiration of her
work; at a literary fund dinner in 1928, Baldwin referred to her as a neglected genius. Consequently her collected works were
people and places, which later infused
republished in a standard edition by Jonathan Cape, becoming
her poetry and prose. In 1902 her family
best sellers in the 1930s and running into many editions.
settled in Meole Brace, Shrewsbury.
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