Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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, 1990.
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.
qtd. in
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press, 1990.
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
In 1928, the year...
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.
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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
5: 303-4 and 303n1
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...
Education
Helen Dunmore
While HD
was growing up she read a lot of Russian fiction and poetry.
qtd. in
McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer, 10 June 2001.
McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer, 10 June 2001.
The books that she read, she says, made me, as a person...
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...
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...
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.
Barcynska, Hélène. Caradoc Evans. Hurst and Blackett, 1946.
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...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her ten anthologiesedited 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
,...
