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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
89
and Molly is a simple village...
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.
71
She was passionately addicted to Greek mythology, but...
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...
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.
According to Smedley...
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...
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...
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...
