Böcker av Mary Webb

In the early 19th century, young Prue and Gideon Sarn live with their mother on a farm around a mere deep in the Shropshire countryside. Their life is full to brimming with the agricultural round, the seasons dominating. Also crucial is all the lore which underlies life - meanings deduced from natural events, modified to some extent by the dicta of the church.Prue is quietly aware of one essential difference in herself - she has a harelip, which her mother tells her sadly is the result of a hare having crossed her path when pregnant. Prue accepts that she will not have the fruitful life of love and children that a young woman of those times could expect. Gideon, after the death of their father, has shown his determined nature by enlisting Prue and their mother in an exhausting round of farmwork. His aim is to make a fortune quickly and buy a much grander house he has spied nearby, with all the servants and status that go with it.Prue's admiration of her brother's strength and handsomeness does not waver, even when he is too single-minded to be truly kind. The daughter of their near neighbours, Jancis Beguildy, sees him similarly, but with added romantic attachment, which is returned by Gideon. Jancis' father is looked upon with great suspicion by the local community as a waker of demons and potential wizard, but, true to her all-welcoming nature, Prue is happy to go there regularly for lessons in reading and writing. On one visit there she also sees the new local weaver, Kester Woodseaves, who, like Gideon, is extraordinarily strong and attractive. Though she sees any romance as impossible due to her blemish, Prue is privately completely captured by the idea of him.Prue and Gideon have the malleable ideas of those attached to the land, where strict church morality is seen as sometimes too restrictive and unreasonable, as long as the intentions of any misdoer are good. Jancis' father has taken against Gideon, for reasons which go back to a feud with their own father. When the physical nature of Gideon and Jancis' relationship prior to their marriage is revealed, something snaps in Beguildy. His revengeful action ushers in enormous disturbance - the tensions surrounding the Sarns and Beguildys in the local community, which had been sleeping, are awoken with savagery. Their quiet lives are devastated, their failings magnified, the impacts reverberating in ever growing circles of disaster. At the centre of the melée, it will take all her strength for Prue to survive.In her last completed novel, first published in 1924, Mary Webb reached for two key differences from her prior work: a setting further back in time, and the use of a first-person narrator, bringing the beginnings of a new and extraordinary lucidity and immediacy to her already poetic prose. Precious Bane was a harbinger of brilliance to come, sadly cut short by Webb's tragic death.

Gillian Lovekin is the daughter of a lonely farm up on the high moorland of Shropshire. Her widowed father, Isaiah, is wealthy, but rustic. In a cottage on the farm lives the Makepeace family: old, slow, garrulous and accident-prone Jonathan, the man-of-all-work, his wife Abigail, cheerful and practical cook and washerwoman, and Abigail's son from a previous marriage, Robert Rideout, the farm's young cowman-shepherd.Gillian and Robert have known each other since childhood, their natures mutually understood like the backs of their hands. But as she has grown older Gillian has come to realise that she is the mistress of the farm, and Robert only one of its workers. The quicksilver of her domineering and attention-loving personality clashes playfully with Robert's more easeful and serious steadiness. She has a beginning notion that he cares deeply for her, but the idea of marrying someone so much her social inferior simply can't be countenanced.When an outsider buys the only other building on their part of the moor, a lonely, decrepit pub called The Mermaid's Rest, Gillian is intrigued by him. Ralph Elmer seems worldly, sophisticated and capable, and most crucially pays her exactly the sort of attention she likes: she is showered with gifts and extravagantly noticed. Her youthful innocence on the one hand, and feelings of intense sensual curiosity on the other, combine to bring about a situation where she has no choice but to marry him, despite her growing feeling of unease about his enigmatic manipulativeness.Robert and Ralph have been navigating a halting truce, despite Robert's heartbreak at Gillian's cruel rejection of him. But when Robert hears the account of a gipsy friend whose baby daughter disappeared in mysterious circumstances many years before, something clicks inside him. His suspicions about Elmer, and his actions toward his exposure, precipitate a hidden tumult of confrontation, desperation and, ultimately, murder. In Seven for a Secret, first published in 1922, Mary Webb took up the skeins which had exemplified her talent hitherto, and twisted them yet further. It is a vibrant novel of fatedness, comedy and rural realities, dedicated to Thomas Hardy. But now this quality became soaked through with near-pagan fabular tinctures, its potent action transpiring under looming skies of otherworldly colour; a brilliant mythic tale which has the numinous feeling of a May-game gone disastrously astray.

Prue Sarn, born with a blight known as a cleft lip, lives her comfortable life on the farm knowing there is little possibility for her because she is different.

Born at the time of Waterloo in the wild country of Shropshire, Prudence Sarn is a wild, passionate girl, cursed with a hare lip -- her 'precious bane'. Cursed for it, too, by the superstitious people amongst whom she lives. Prue loves two things: the remote countryside of her birth and, hopelessly, Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. The tale of how Woodseaves gradually discerns Prue's true beauty is set against the tragic drama of Prue's brother, Gideon, a driven man who is out of harmony with the natural world.

Dormer is an old house with Elizabethan origins, much added to. It sits, very isolated, in a cup of the Shropshire hills, surrounded by forest. The Darke family have lived there for centuries. Solomon Darke is a squire farmer who tends to unthinking conservatism; his wife Rachel is harsh, fierce and uncompromising. They have four children - the eldest is the sensitive and original Amber, who feels, at thirty, that life has passed her by. Her brothers Jasper and Peter are more strong-willed - Jasper questions all around him in a determined but romantic way, while Peter has no time for any fuss and forcefully seeks simple pleasures. Their younger sister Ruby is biddable, nä¿¿ve and full of laughter. Rachel Darke's ancient mother lives with them, a harridan remnant in ringlets and flounces, dominating this already intense family with savage outbursts and calculating glances. Completing the family is Catherine, a young relative of Rachel and her mother, whose icy beauty has entrapped Jasper, and whose cold passions equal in power the heat of the Darkes'. A complex web of personal desires and long held antipathies becomes activated in the first instance by Jasper's return home, having been expelled from college for his rejection of religion. As hoped-for alliances collapse, dubious loves flower, well-laid plans go awry, and thwarted yearnings erupt into flame, this singular family and all around them are drawn into a seeming vortex which threatens to carry all with it to destruction. Mary Webb's personality shared a great deal with that of Emily Brontë, in terms not only of her love of nature and its kindling power, but also of her openness to the fullness of ardency. In this extraordinary third novel she delved this self profoundly, also introducing, in a way she hadn't before, leavening humour and cool analysis of character to balance this modern gothic vehemence. The House in Dormer Forest is heady and fascinating, risking a great deal and triumphing uniquely.

Mary Webb was passionately devoted to revealing nature in all of its expressions and forms. She was diagnosed with Graves' disease at the age of 20, and in times of recovery she early noticed that her love of nature sped her healing. She also, in these sensitive times of contemplation and struggle, saw the natural world more tenderly and luminously; the urgencies of life were clearer. The Spring of Joy collects together a group of exquisite essays of appreciation, written with the idea of succouring 'the weary and wounded in the battle of life.' They are an extraordinary record of a woman's empathy, not only for the beauty, colour, form, delicacy and majesty of the natural world, but also for her fellow human beings who suffer.

* A work of rare poetic beauty in the tradition of the Brontes and Hardy