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Precious Bane

Precious Bane

by Mary Webb

328 pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback

Published: August 1990

ISBN 9780268015381

$20.00

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Born at the time of Waterloo in the wild country of Shropshire, Prudence Sarn is a wild, passionate girl, cursed with a hare lip -- her 'precious bane'. Cursed for it, too, by the superstitious people amongst whom she lives. Prue loves two things: the remote countryside of her birth and, hopelessly, Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. The tale of how Woodseaves gradually discerns Prue's true beauty is set against the tragic drama of Prue's brother, Gideon, a driven man who is out of harmony with the natural world.

Mary Gladys Webb (1881-1927) was an English romance novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people whom she knew. Her novels have been successfully dramatized, most notably the film Gone to Earth in 1950 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger based on the novel of the same title. The novels are thought to have inspired the famous parody Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons.

"Webb was a great mystic and a master of both "inscape" and landscape. Any dull afternoon in London is lifted by being transported to the Mary Webb country of the Shropshire hills and the Welsh borderland." —Mail on Sunday

"Mary Webb need fear no comparison with any writer who has attempted to capture the soul of nature in words." —John Buchan

"On some bookshelves, we feel sure, Precious Bane will find almost a hallowed place." —The New York Times Book Review

"The book opens with one of those simple sentences which haunt the mind until the curiosity has been satisfied . . . It strikes a note which never fails throughout; it opens with a beauty which is justified to the last sentence." —Hilda Addison