Precious Bane (Virago Modern Classics)

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And then there is the weaver, Kester Woodseaves, who besots the women who see him, and for whom Prue longs, despite knowing no such man would ever accept a “hare-shotten” woman. She died on October 8, 1927, at St Leonard’s-on-Sea, with her old governess Miss Lory at her bedside.

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

His lust for money and power propels him, and he drives himself and his sister to the point of collapse in his efforts to amass the wealth he desires. she cried again very pitifully, because Father had died in his wrath, with all his sins upon him, and besides, he had died in his boots, which is a very unket thing and bodes no good.She goes particularly far to help the man of her dreams, the man she has fallen for, the weaver Kester Woodseaves.

Mary Webb - Wikipedia Mary Webb - Wikipedia

He was ever a strong man, which is almost the same times, as to say, a man with little time for kindness. These locations remained very rural at the time the novel was written, and Mary Webb was herself very much part of local country life there in the 1920s. Also the evident contrast between brother and sister, between evil and goodness: Prue's silent acceptance and her brother's endless thirst to yield power; her ability to be at ease with herself in spite of her faults versus Gideon's incapacity to accept his position in the world; her humble ways, his capricious goals. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. It strikes a note which never fails throughout; it opens with a beauty which is justified to the last sentence.

Her passionate love of nature resonates with us even more in the 21st century, when climate change, pollution and threats to wildlife overshadow our daily lives. A monumental bust of Mary Webb, commissioned by the Mary Webb Society, was unveiled in the grounds of Shrewsbury Library on 9 July 2016. In those first mystical moments, he becomes her “master” and his image and spirit will infuse her thoughts in the hard days ahead. This wonderful novel has been on my radar ever since I read a review of a reprint edition back in the early 80s.

Precious Bane | Victorian England, Rural Life, Nature

Stanley Baldwin suggested that the strength of Precious Bane lies in “the fusion of elements of nature and man”.I don't know what exactly it was about it struck me as exquisitely beautiful, but it touched me and I finished it feeling like a better person.

Biography - Mary Webb Society Biography - Mary Webb Society

This novel may then be considered to have been written in English when the language was still a young boy of thirteen.Autobiographical elements can be seen in the heroine of Precious Bane, Prue Sarn, who is afflicted with a hare-lip and is treated as a social pariah. The strength of this novel is its narrator: Prue is brave and tender, naïve and yet astute, full of sympathy for her fellow man, and a brilliant poet of the natural, enchanted world around her, in which “the cowslip gold seemed to get into your heart”. The meaning of some but not all of the vocabulary can be inferred, and initially I made regular use of an online guide to Shropshire dialect and the Oxford English Dictionary to understand the more opaque words and phrases. That was back in 1989 when the BBC film of Precious Bane, filmed in Shropshire and starring Janet McTeer, John Bowe and Clive Owen, was released.