Precious Bane (Webb) 6

Precious Bane has been languishing on my bookshelves for some time as I hadn't particularly enjoyed the other Mary Webb that I had read, Gone to earth. However, I felt it was time to give it a go, and thought it would provide a good contrast to the other VMCs that I've been reading recently. Which it did.

Precious Bane is a rather lovely tale that evokes the countryside of Shropshire in the early 19th century. Although the book tells the story of Prue, a girl with a hare-lip, who only becomes conscious of it being a problem due to the reactions around her, the beauty of the book is in the descriptions of the land, the pastoral scenes, and the depiction of countryside customs, such as hiring fairs and "caking" (playing cards for cake - I like the sound of that!). Prue loves the countryside and this is readily apparent in the writing:

"Sitting there looking into the green trees, with the smell of our hay coming freshly on the breeze, mixed with the scent of wild roses and meadowsweet in the orchard ditch, I hearkened to the blackbirds singing near and far. When they were a long way off you could scarcely disentangle them from all the other birds, for there was a regular charm of them, thrushes and willow-wrens, seven coloured linnets, canbottlins, finches and writing-maisters. It was a weaving of many threads, with one maister-thread of clear gold, a very comfortable thing to hear"

The book is certainly reminiscent of Hardy and the Brontes, but it has a style all of its own.

Mary Webb is an author who was neglected during her lifetime; although she wrote 6 novels she did not achieve any sort of popularity until after her death, when Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister) read Precious Bane and began to publicise it; the Virago edition contains a foreword written by Baldwin.

This was a very early VMC, number 6 in fact, and has been published four times - I especially like the most recent two covers which feature mystical countryside/pastoral images. My copy is the most recent one which has a wonderful turquoise spine. It looks like all of Mary Webb has been included in the VMC list, so there are four more novels to go. Although I did enjoy this one much more than Gone to earth, I feel that a little Mary Webb can go quite a long way. 3.5*

The sheltered life (Glasgow) 61

According to the blurb inside the jacket, Ellen Glasgow is considered one of America's most eminent classic writers, along with Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. I was thus intrigued as to what I would make of The sheltered life, since I like Cather immensely, but am less enthusiastic about Wharton.

The book tells the story of a number of characters living in Queensborough, a small town in the American South around the turn of the last century, told from the perspective of 76-year old General Archbald and his granddaughter Jenny Blair. The book mainly deals with the changing circumstances due to the growth of industry in the run up to the First World War and describes how this impacts on the mores of religion and convention. Bits of the book amused me, such as the opening scene where Jenny is reading Little Women, and being paid 1c per page by her grandfather (a lucrative deal since the book is over 500pp long), but despite this promising opening I struggled to enjoy it.

Just published the once by Virago, the edition had a fascinating introduction by Glasgow which discussed how she went about writing and how she concieved The sheltered life.