Mary Webb

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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.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
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.
1
Black and white photograph of Mary Webb, shown in profile, from the shoulders up. She is wearing a simple light dress with a high collar and her dark hair is pulled back into a bun.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susan Tweedsmuir
The opening proper of this volume invokes with some trepidation George Sand 's statement that there is nothing more tedious than the dregs of an old régime.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. A Winter Bouquet. G. Duckworth.
20
Again the structure of the book is...
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
MW has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
In 1976 MW was one of an Open University team or collective which produced a text for a course in Art and Environment, entitled The Great Divide: The Sexual Division of Labour; or, Is it...
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
This remarkable anthology brings to a wider audience poems by many otherwise unknown writers, as well as by, for instance, Vera Brittain , Edith Sitwell , Nancy Cunard , Cicely Hamilton , Rose Macaulay ,...
Textual Production Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her ten anthologies edited during the 1920s (some of them under pseudonyms such as Leonard Gray) had some significance for the writing of that decade, since they incorporated contributions from, for instance, Marghanita Laski
Textual Production Margiad Evans
Work by both ME and her sister was included in Welsh Short Stories. An Anthology, which appeared in 1937 with no named editor but with the help of Elizabeth Inglis Jones . Margiad was...
Textual Features Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
This powerful novel belongs to the rural-inheritance genre, as practised about this time by Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith , and as later mocked by Stella Gibbons . Like the work of Webb and Kaye-Smith...
Textual Features Mona Caird
The title refers to an ancient ring of standing stones which features in the novel, a place of ritual and supposedly of human sacrifice, probably based on the Stones of Cairnholy not far from the...
Residence Susan Tweedsmuir
ST began her married life in Hyde Park Square in London, and would walk her elder two children in Hyde Park on the nanny's day off. After living at two other London addresses, the...
Reception Stella Gibbons
SG 's Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Femina Vie-Heureuse, worth forty pounds (as Webb 's Precious Bane had done only seven years previously). Gibbons's award was presented in June 1934.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 303-4 and 303n1
Reception Constance Holme
This novel won CH the Femina-Vie Heureuse award. Regarding the novel, Margaret Crosland points out that Holme is as reticent as Mary Webb is lyrical, that she eschews yokel colour, that her Cumbrian characters...
Publishing Hélène Barcynska
She began writing a fortnight after he died.
Barcynska, Hélène. Caradoc Evans. Hurst and Blackett.
12
Her photographic illustrations include a beautiful portrait of Mary Webb . Her husband had asked her, if she wrote his life, neither to caricature nor to...
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...
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.
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.
85
The Times Literary Supplement notice began: No matter what fine work...

Timeline

30 July 1935: Penguin Books issued its first ten titles:...

Writing climate item

30 July 1935

Penguin Books issued its first ten titles: sixpenny paperbacks with a characteristic penguin logo.

Texts

Webb, Mary, and Martin Armstrong. Armour Wherein He Trusted. J. Cape, 1928.
Webb, Mary. Collected Prose and Poems. Editor Coles, Gladys Mary, Wildings, 1977.
Webb, Mary. Gone to Earth. Constable, 1917.
Webb, Mary. Precious Bane. J. Cape, 1924.
Lavery, Bryony, and Mary Webb. Precious Bane. Oberon Books, 2003.
Webb, Mary. Selected Poems of Mary Webb. Editor Coles, Gladys Mary, Headland, 1981.
Webb, Mary. Seven for a Secret. Hutchinson, 1922.
Webb, Mary. The Golden Arrow. Constable, 1916.
Webb, Mary. The House in Dormer Forest. Hutchinson, 1920.
Webb, Mary. The Spring of Joy. J. M. Dent; E. P. Dutton, 1917.