Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Mary Webb
-
Standard Name: Webb, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Gladys Meredith
Married Name: Mary Gladys Webb
MW
became very well known in the early twentieth century as a poetic regional novelist. She also wrote poetry, essays, short stories, and reviews. Her subject-matter is a rural past of love, violence, beauty and cruelty, of nature's power and mystery, of passionate lives, particularly those of tragic women. She herself wrote that the hero [sic] of a country story must be instinct with the countryside: it is in his very bones; it is also his voice. The kind of fiction she aimed at unifies its characters with the earth, half frustrate, half triumphal.
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press, 1990.
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Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Education | Penelope Lively | Initially learning at home, Penelope became well versed in the Authorised Version, tales of Greece and Rome, The Arabian Nights and not much else. Lively, Penelope. A House Unlocked. Grove Press, 2001. 71 |
Education | Helen Dunmore | While HD
was growing up she read a lot of Russian fiction and poetry. McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer. McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer. |
Education | Philip Larkin | For ten years from 1930, as both a primary and a secondary-school student, PL
attended King Henry VIII School
in Coventry (now an independent school for both sexes, but founded in the sixteenth century as... |
Family and Intimate relationships | Nina Bawden | Her mother, Ellalaine Ursula May Cushing (always called Judy), was born in 1898. Once the long-jump champion of Norfolk, she was still fit enough in her seventies to turn a neat cartwheel. Bawden, Nina. In My Own Time: Almost An Autobiography. Virago, 1995. 1 |
Friends, Associates | Hélène Barcynska | Friends of HB
and her husband during these years included Gwyn Jones
, editor of the Welsh Review, George Green
of the University of Wales
, actress Violet Lamb
, and novelist Ruby M. Ayres |
Friends, Associates | Susan Tweedsmuir | ST
first heard of Mary Webb
, towards the end of the First World War, as an author whose books did not sell despite her excellent reviews. She read Gone to Earth, wrote Webb... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Bryony Lavery | The two women are quickly transported into the romance, where Lady Harriet Helstone is the rich and lovely, ardent and wilful scion of the hard-drinking, hard-riding, rakehelly Helstones, Lavery, Bryony. Plays, 1. Methuen Drama, 1998. 89 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Ethel M. Dell | The novel traces the great love of Frances and Arthur; Penelope Dell
reads them as Ethel and her new husband
, with the tyrannical Bishop of Burminster drawn from Ethel's sister Ella
, his weak... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Stella Gibbons | The idea for the novel germinated while SG
was working at the Evening Standard; she wrote much of it while travelling to and from work on the London tube. Briggs, Asa. A History of Longmans and Their Books 1724 - 1990. Longevity in Publishing. British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2008. 390 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Stella Gibbons | Such earthy regionalists—who include Thomas Hardy
and D. H. Lawrence
, as well as Webb
and Kaye-Smith
—become the butt of SG
's satire in Cold Comfort Farm. Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury, 1998. 66, 112 |
Literary responses | Constance Smedley | This work was reviewed by Mary Webb
for the Bookman in January 1925 together with Ethel Sidgwick
's Laura: A Cautionary Story and V. H. Friedlaender
's The Colour of Youth. Crawford, Mary, and Bruce Crawford. “Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Mary Webb”. Mary Webb, Neglected Genius. |
Literary responses | Sheila Kaye-Smith | This novel brought critical and popular acclaim. SKS
said that the weeks following its appearance were some of the happiest of her life. Walker, Dorothea. Sheila Kaye-Smith. Twayne, 1980. 85 |
Performance of text | Bryony Lavery | BL
's dramatic adaptation of Precious Bane by Mary Webb
, put on by the Pentabus Theatre Company
, was performed successively at several historic houses and at the Shrewsbury arts festival. “Biographies: Bryony Lavery”. MCC’s Last Easter - Full Casting Announced. “Precious Bane is a real treat”. BBC: Shropshire: Theatre & Arts. |
Author summary | Stella Gibbons | SG
was a gifted comic writer whose lively, parodic first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was such a success that it has tended to eclipse her later achievements. Much of her writing was inspired by... |
Publishing | Hélène Barcynska | She began writing a fortnight after he died. Barcynska, Hélène. Caradoc Evans. Hurst and Blackett, 1946. 12 |
Timeline
30 July 1935
Penguin Books
issued its first ten titles: sixpenny paperbacks with a characteristic penguin logo.