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, 1990.
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.
qtd. in
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press, 1990.
SG
's Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Femina Vie-Heureuse, worth forty pounds (as Webb
's Precious Bane had done only seven years previously). Gibbons's award was presented in June 1934.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
5: 303-4 and 303n1
Reception
Constance Holme
This novel won CH
the Femina-Vie Heureuse award. Regarding the novel, Margaret Crosland
points out that Holme is as reticent as Mary Webb
is lyrical, that she eschews yokel colour, that her Cumbrian characters...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Mona Caird
The title refers to an ancient ring of standing stones which features in the novel, a place of ritual and supposedly of human sacrifice, probably based on the Stones of Cairnholy not far from the...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her ten anthologiesedited during the 1920s (some of them under pseudonyms such as Leonard Gray) had some significance for the writing of that decade, since they incorporated contributions from, for instance, Marghanita Laski
,...
Work by both ME
and her sister was included in Welsh Short Stories. An Anthology, which appeared in 1937 with no named editor but with the help of Elizabeth Inglis Jones
. Margiad was...
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...
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, 1954.
