Precious Bane (Virago Modern Classics)

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Her brother, Gideon, is in love with the beautiful Jancis, daughter of a man who fancies himself a wizard and objects to the match. He wishes to marry her, but first and foremost he wishes to be rich and prominent–an important man. His lust for money and power propels him, and he drives himself and his sister to the point of collapse in his efforts to amass the wealth he desires. He is a good man, a hard-worker, but his obsession for money, the precious bane, takes all precedence in his life, and as we often see in our own time, the blind pursuit of money often loses us our chances of happiness. I think, times, that in our mortal language there are no words for the things that are of most account." The setting for the story has been attributed to the Meres of northern Shropshire, but is more likely to have been the area around Bomere Pool which was closer to the author's own home at Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill. The travel writer S. P. B. Mais recorded being taken to the pool to see the location of “Sarn” in the 1930s. [1] These locations remained very rural at the time the novel was written, and Mary Webb was herself very much part of local country life there in the 1920s. Webb uses the rural setting to isolate Prue Sarn and her fellow characters from the larger world; at one point Prue tells us, "four years went by, and though a deal happened out in the world, naught happened to us. [2] Title [ edit ]

Precious Bane - Mary Webb - Google Books Precious Bane - Mary Webb - Google Books

My goodness, what to say about this book? It has to be read to be imagined, the language is a beauteous thing even without the timeless story. What harm, to drink a sup of your own wine and chumble a crust of your own bread? But if you dunna care, let be. He can go with the sin on him.'Set in Shropshire, England, after the Napoleonic Wars. Narrated by Prue Sarn, a young woman with a cleft lip, or hare-shotten lip, as it is called in the book.

Precious Bane by Mary Webb | Goodreads Precious Bane by Mary Webb | Goodreads

Prudence Sarn was born with a cleft palate, her ‘precious bane’, for which she is persecuted as a witch by her superstitious neighbours. Hiding from daily ridicule, she takes refuge in the wild Shropshire countryside, developing a profound love of nature. Furtively, Prue longs to be loved and harbours a hopeless passion for Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. I’m descended from farmers on both sides of my family, and although I’ve never experienced the toil of that life, it always resonates when I read about it. I find the lifestyle incredibly inspiring, making me want to throw down my book, roll up my sleeves, and get to work. Critic Hilda Addison summed up Precious Bane: "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."I will leave this book with a link to a folk song that recurs constantly during its telling. I found the recording and thought it was too perfect, for it captures the atmosphere of the tale and wrings a tear. Stanley Baldwin suggested that the strength of Precious Bane lies in “the fusion of elements of nature and man”. Do you agree? What was the effect, for you, of Mary Webb’s representation of the natural world? Michel Faber is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. Born in Holland in 1960, he moved to Australia with his family at the age of seven. As an adult, he emigrated to Scotland, where he has lived in the Highlands since 1992. Faber spent several years working as a nurse before his first book, a collection of short stories, was published in 1998, to wide critical acclaim. He has since written several further collections, and six novels, including The Crimson Petal and the White. He has stated that The Book of Strange New Things will be his final novel. Her writing in general was reviewed as notable for poetic descriptions of nature. Another aspect throughout her work was a close and fatalistic view on human psychology. [12] Before there were writers’ workshops to teach everyone to write the same— Show, don’t tell! Use all five senses! No prologues! No dialect!—from time to time a truly original voice would appear. Richard Llewellyns How Green Was My Valley springs to mind, with a rhythm, cadence, and vocabulary, sustained throughout the book, which created a unique world, and a worldview, in the reader’s mind. Books like that make me feel my brain’s expanding so fast it’s going to explode. Precious Bane is a book like that.