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
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
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
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...
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.
1
She was...
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...
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...
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.
The poems of Osip Mandelstam were her talismans.
McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer.
The books that she read, she says, made me, as a person...
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...
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...
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.
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.
66, 112
Reggie Oliver suggests that...
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...
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...
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 ,...

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.