MARY MERIDITH, the author of _Precious Bane_, was born in the little
village of Leighton, near Cressage, under the Wrekin, on March 25th,
1881, and died at St. Leonards, October 8th, 1927, and was buried at
Shrewsbury. She was the daughter of George Edward Meredith, a
schoolmaster of Welsh descent, by his marriage with Sarah Alice Scott,
daughter of an Edinburgh doctor of the clan of Sir Walter Scott. She was
the eldest of six children and spent her early girlhood at The Grange, a
small country house near Much Wenlock; from 12 to 21 she lived at
Stanton-on-Hine-Heath, six miles north-east of Shrewsbury, and for the
next ten years at The Old Mill, Meole Brace, a mile from Shrewsbury. In
1912 Mary Meredith married Mr. Henry Bertram Law Webb, a Cambridge
graduate and a native of Shropshire. After two years at
Weston-super-Mare, where Mr. Webb had a post in a school, Mr. and Mrs.
Webb returned to Shropshire, living at Pontesbury and Lyth Hill, working
as market gardeners and selling the produce at their own stall in
Shrewsbury market. Mrs. Webb had written stories and poems from
childhood, but it was at this period that she seriously turned her mind
to writing novels. A volume of essays on nature, _The Spring of Joy_,
and three novels, _The Golden Arrow_, _Gone to Earth_, and _The House in
Dormer Forest_, had been published before she came to live in London in
1921. _Seven for a Secret_ followed in 1922 and _Precious Bane_ in 1924.
It was awarded the “Femina Vie Heureuse” Prize for 1924-5 given annually
for the best work of imagination in prose or verse descriptive of
English life by an author who had not attained sufficient recognition.
I am indebted for these biographical particulars to Mr. Webb to whom
_Precious Bane_ is inscribed. I never met Mary Webb and knew nothing of
her work until I read _Precious Bane_ at Christmas, 1926. I am glad to
think that I was in time to send her a few words of appreciation.
The stupid urban view of the countryside as dull receives a fresh and
crushing answer in the books of Mary Webb. All the novels except
_Precious Bane_ are set in the hill country of south-west Shropshire,
between the Clee Hills and the Breiddens, and between Shrewsbury and
Ludlow. The scene of _Precious Bane_ is the country of north Shropshire
meres—the Ellesmere district, but the dialect is that of south
Shropshire. It is the country of the Severn lowlands and of isolated
upland ridges where Celt and Saxon have met and mingled for centuries.
For the passing traveller it is inhabited by an uncommunicative
population dwelling among places with names like Stedment and Squilver
and Stiperstone, Nipstone and Nind. There are of course the old castles
and timbered black and white houses for the motoring visitors. But to
the imaginative child brought up among the ploughlands and pools and
dragon-flies there is “a richness on the world, so it looked what our
parson used to call sumptuous.” It is this richness which Mary Webb saw
and felt as a girl and remembered with lyrical intensity as a woman.
She has interlaced with this natural beauty the tragic drama of a youth
whose whole being is bent on toil and thrift and worldly success only to
find himself defeated on the morrow of the harvest by the firing of the
cornricks by the father of his lover. The dour figure of Gideon Sarn is
set against that of his gentle sister, Prudence, who tells the tale. She
is a woman flawed with a hare-shotten lip and cursed in the eyes of the
neighbours until her soul’s loveliness is discerned by Kester
Woodseaves, the weaver. And so there comes to her at the end of the
story the love which is “the peace to which all hearts do strive.”
The strength of the book is not in its insight into human character,
though that is not lacking. Nor does it lie in the inevitability with
which the drama is unfolded and the sin of an all-absorbing and selfish
ambition punished. It lies in the fusion of the elements of nature and
man, as observed in this remote countryside by a woman even more alive
to the changing moods of nature than of man. Almost any page at random
will furnish an illustration of the blending of human passion with the
fields and skies.
“So they rode away, and the sound of the people died till it was
less than the hum of a midge, and there was nothing but a scent
of rosemary, and warm sun, and the horse lengthening its stride
towards the mountains, whence came the air of morning.” (p.
117).
One reviewer compared _Precious Bane_ to a sampler stitched through long
summer evenings in the bay window of a remote farmhouse. And sometimes
writers of Welsh and Border origin, like William Morris, have had their
work compared to old tapestries. But while these comparisons suggest
something of the harmonies of colour they fail to convey the emotional
force which glows in these pages. Nature to Mary Webb was not a pattern
on a screen. Her sensibility is so acute and her power over words so
sure and swift that one who reads some passages in Whitehall has almost
the physical sense of being in Shropshire corn-fields.
_Precious Bane_ is a revelation not of unearthly but of earthly beauty
in one bit of the England of Waterloo, the Western edge, haunted with
the shadows of superstition, the legendary lore and phantasy of
neighbours on the Border, differing in blood and tongue. This mingling
of peoples and traditions and turns of speech and proverbial wisdom is
what Mary Webb saw with the eye of the mind as she stood at her stall in
Shrewsbury market, fastened in her memory, and fashioned for us in the
little parcel of novels which is her legacy to literature.
STANLEY BALDWIN
10 Downing Street, S.W.1.
October, 1928