When Mary Webb died in 1927 at the untimely age of 46, she was a modestly admired writer noted for her observant nature descriptions tinged with a touch of mysticism. A year later, Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister, referred to her as a 'neglected genius' and sparked a craze.
Johnathan Cape reissued her works that sold in the thousands a trend that lasted through the 30s. Her, and similar, writing was satirized in Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (1932), and her writing was typecast as 'soil and gloom romance.' The height of this posthumous fame was probably in 1950 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turned one of her novels, 'Gone to Earth' into a film.
After which her work fell into abeyance with Virago bringing three of her novels back into print in the 80s and modestly keeping them there ever since.
This is undoubtedly a shame. It is true that her fondness for the local dialect and expression of her native Shropshire can create barriers to full comprehension (and probably a loss of access to her allusion and depth) but nothing that is not surmountable with a touch of patience; and, what a world opens up?
Certainly, it is a living world - not only in the sense that she is a gifted nature writer observant both of what is present and what it has come to mean in the weavings of folk traditions and of place but also as the aliveness in which we live, and move and have our being. Nature has its purposes that unfold transcendent to any particular self that invites us to a deeper navigation - and is charged with potential for good and evil. The landscape and its creatures take on character and act in ways that point beyond mere projection or the pathetic fallacy.
Webb was ambiguous in her attitude to Christianity - too alive, like Hardy, to tragedy and fate to be fully at home in its hope-filled messaging, more comfortable in something at once more homely, Pagan yet forbidding too. It is contrasting these two worlds that the Medieval setting of her last unfinished novel, 'Armour Wherein We Trusted', turned and beautifully illustrates the differing worlds on offer that may (or may not) find ultimate reconciliation in an earth renewed by heaven.
She is oft-criticized, like Hardy, for having her characters too driven by their fate, resistant to change even when there is an urgency for it, too bearing down on the tragic possibilities of life. This is probably a matter of taste (and viewpoint) but can easily be flipped into a realistic perception of the balance between our own agency, the fixities of our character, and of the custom and society we find ourselves in. She is a perceptive psychologist (even if our own fantasies of free agency rebel) and excellent at describing what the French psychologist, Henri Wallon, would call 'confiscation' where we surrender ourselves to the portraits other people paint of us. In a world of anxiety over our social images, and their shaping in social media, what could be more topically relevant?
And, finally, she can write a well-paced engaging story with characters about whom one cares and with a freedom about their relationships one with another that belied the age of her writing. She can write stories that deserve multiple readings and always offer up something new, so if not quite a genius, certainly a neglected author deserving of a wider, and deeper, audience.
Gladys Mary Coles' biographical study, pictured above is excellent, as is her fuller biography, and captures Webbs' gifts and shadows beautifully. One final 'tragedy' was the late estrangement from her husband, who with his new wife, was ironically to benefit from her posthumous fame!
Comments
Post a Comment