Precious Bane [antikvár]

Introduction Mary Meredith, the author of Precious Bane, was born in the little village of Leighton, near Gressage, under the Wrekin, on March 25th, 1881, and died at St. Leonards, October 8th, 1927, and was buried at Shrewsbury. She was the daughter of George Edward Meredith, a schoolmaster of Welsh descent, by his marriage with Sarah Alice Scott, daughter of an Edinburgh doctor of the clan of Sir Walter Scott. She was the eldest of six children and spent her early girlhood at The Grange, a small country house near Much Wenlock; from 12 to 21 she lived at Stanton-on-Hine-Heath, six miles north-east of Shrewsbury, and for the next ten years at The Old Mill, Meole Brace, a mile from Shrewsbury. In 1912 Mary Meredith married Mr. Henry Bertram Law Webb, a Cambridge graduate and a native of Shropshire. After two years at Weston-super-Mare, where Mr. Webb had a post in a school, Mr. and Mrs. Webb returned to Shropshire, living at Pontesbury and Lyth Hill, working as market gardeners and selling the produce at their own stall in Shrewsbury market. Mrs. Webb had written stories and poems from childhood, but it was at this period that she seriously turned her mind to writing novels. A volume of essays on nature, The Spring of Joy, and three novels. The Golden Arrow, Gone to Earth, and The House in Dormer Forest, had been published before she came to live in London in 1921. Seven for a Secret followed in 1922 and Precious Bane in 1924. It was awarded the Temina Vie Heureuse' Prize for 1924-5 given annually for the best work of imagination in prose or verse descriptive of English life by an author who had not attained sufficient recognition. I am indebted for these biographical particulars to Mr. Webb, to whom Precious Bane is inscribed. I never met Mary Webb and knew nothing of her work until I read Precious 7