Mary 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.