Biography

Mary Gladys Meredith (known as a child as “Glad” or “Gladys,” but after marriage and throughout this text as “Mary”) was born in 1881 in the Welsh borderlands, the eldest by six years, of the six children of George Edward Meredith (1841–1909) and his wife, Sarah Alice (née Scott 1852–1924, and known as “Alice”). George Meredith, an Oxford M.A. and country gentleman of Welsh descent, ran a boarding school for boys and kept a home farm. Known as a cultured man who wrote poetry and painted, he was by reputation generous, humorous and a lover of nature.

In the seven years spanning 1887 to 1894, five additional children were born to George and Alice Meredith. Mary’s siblings, close in age, gravitated toward each other’s company. Mary’s six-year seniority made her a solitary child and, according to Webb’s biographer, Gladys Mary Coles, young Mary saw little of her mother, who was busy with the latest baby and a nursery filled with toddlers.

George Meredith, although busily engaged with his students and oversight of the farm, schooled Mary at home alongside his pupils. Precocious Mary was, from her earliest days, her father’s special child. Coles states in The Flower of Light (1978) that George nicknamed his eldest child his “precious bane,” from Milton’s Paradise Lost (I. 692). She was given free run of her father’s library. Young Mary acquired from her father a deep love of the Welsh borderlands and knowledge of local history, legends and folklore as he took her on long walks and drives. An amateur poet himself, Mary’s father encouraged her to express her perceptions of nature in poetry and prose. Mary was also allowed to wander the Shropshire fields, woods, and lanes, where she developed an acute perception of the smallest elements in nature (e.g., the sparkle of dew on grass, the sound of leaves falling from their branches, the ripple of water in changing winds).

When Mary was ten, Miss Edith Lory, known as “Minoni” to the Meredith children, joined the family as governess; she eventually taught all six of the Meredith children. Biographies state that Minoni did a great deal to widen young Mary’s literary horizons at an impressionable age. Mary’s studies included her favorite writers: Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, the Brontës, Richard Jeffries, and Thomas Hardy. Miss Lory later told Hilda Addison: “Gladys would sit by the hour while I read Shakespeare to her, and she grew to love the plays more than anything in literature.” Mary could quote at length from the major poets and was thorough and knowledgeable when discussing literature and history. At the age of fourteen, Mary was sent to Mrs. Walmsley’s Finishing School in Southport for two years. Upon completion of this education, Mary helped her father and Minoni to raise her younger siblings after her mother, having suffered a riding accident during a hunt, had taken to her bed as a semi-invalid.

The next few years, while her mother kept to her bedroom, were among the happiest of Mary’s life. Mary dedicated herself to her family with a maternal and protective attitude. She enjoyed being needed and shared with her father his “unfailing delight” in the children. As an adolescent, Mary was said to have created stories, poems, and plays to amuse her younger brothers and sisters. In keeping with her nature—firmly believing that her father and the children should have whatever they wanted—Mary was unstinting in her generosity. Coles in The Flower of Light (1978) states: “She [Minoni] had vivid recollections of Mary’s creative zeal—arranging charades and plays to amuse her brothers and sisters, boldly ransacking her mother’s wardrobes and chests for silk clothing in which to dress them as fairy characters or flowers—poppy, primrose, forget-me-not, daffodil.” The family returned Mary’s affection. As long as she lived, their eldest sister was particularly beloved by her siblings.

In the spring of 1900 Mary’s mother unexpectedly reappeared, after many years spent in her bedroom as a semi-invalid, and rejoined the family without comment. Biographers speculate that Alice, a proper Victorian matron, arose from her bed when she believed that the lack of economic sense showed by her husband George and daughter Mary was leading the family to financial ruin. Nineteen-year-old Mary was henceforward relieved of family responsibilities. She was expected to obey her mother’s wishes respectfully and to follow her iron discipline.

Alice Meredith’s sudden reappearance was an emotional shock for Mary. Relieved of her family duties, she took her bicycle on long expeditions through the countryside. In 1901, after a particularly long bike ride, twenty-year-old Mary collapsed and became ill, causing grave concern to her family. Her first symptoms were tiredness after exertion, moodiness, weight loss, nervous irritability, goiter and protrusion of the eyeballs. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease (a then-incurable glandular disorder in which the thyroid becomes overactive), Mary was tenderly nursed by her father for the next six months. During this time, she withdrew into an introspective isolation. Using the next two years’ convalescence to read and write, Mary was encouraged by her father and Minoni to express her thoughts, perceptions, and observations in prose and poetry. Her early essays, written during these years, were published fifteen years later under the title The Spring of Joy (1917).

Sensitive to her altered appearance and painfully conscious of her difference from others, Mary found solace in writing over the following decade. She sought to capture her ever-changing thoughts and moods in verse and prose. With a keen sensory awareness, Mary was able to detect and describe with poetic feeling the subtlest qualities and minutest of details. Walter de la Mare in his introduction to Poems and The Spring of Joy (1928) said: “The mere statement of facts that she was interested in is poetical in effect. ‘The pollen grain of chicory—an outer and inner hexagon united by rays—is a rose window in a shrine of lapis lazuli. It needs no light behind it, for it illumines itself.’ Few observers have taken the pains to describe an object so minute in terms so precise, yet the words are poetical in effect; they are charged with life and significance, and only a loving rapture in the thing itself could have found them for this purpose.” Mary’s physical limitations helped crystallize her thoughts—her writing became a creative, imaginative, and philosophical outlet. She worked assiduously on her verse, submitting poems and prose for publication, and was more than occasionally gratified to see her work printed in local periodicals.

The Gates of Gold and Green
Nature has opened her gates again!
Her gates of gold and green;
Has opened them wide to welcome me
Back to her glorious liberty,
To her wholesome grass and sun and rain,
Through her gates of gold and green.
The infinite sky bends close to me
With a great protecting calm,
And wave upon wave of its peace profound
Steals on my spirit and circles me round
With the stillness of eternity
And a great protecting calm.
Mary Webb: Collected Prose and Poems (1977)

In January 1909, when Mary was twenty-eight, George Meredith died. Mary’s intense, long-lasting grief for her beloved father undermined her already fragile health. Over the next three years, she again suffered long spells of recurring Graves’ disease, with its accompanying symptoms of exhaustion, high fever, nervousness, severe headache, and gastric distress. The physical manifestations of her illness became more pronounced. Mary again sought solace in poetry and writing.

As Mary’s health improved, she attended Cambridge University Extension lectures in Shrewsbury. In 1910, at a local literary discussion group, Mary met her future husband, Henry Bertram Law Webb (known to his family as “Bertie,” but referred to throughout this text as “Henry”). A Shropshire native, Henry was a recent graduate of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, whose parents had recently moved to the village of Meole Brace where the Meredith family was then living.

Mary loved Henry instantly and rapturously. They shared a deep appreciation for nature and literature and she considered him a brilliant scholar. In 1911, the Bodley Head published The Silences of the Moon, Henry’s philosophical treatise about man’s place in nature. He spoke encouragingly to Mary of her poems. Gladys Mary Coles says in Mary Webb (1990): “Henry gave Mary companionship and understanding such as she had known only with her father. He filled the emotional vacuum in her life.” Henry proposed to Mary and was joyfully accepted. When they married on June 12, 1912, Mary was thirty-one and Henry was twenty-six.

After their wedding, in order to be near his newly-widowed mother, Henry and Mary moved to Weston-super-Mare on the Somerset coast, where Henry had secured a two-year position at a local boys’ school. While at Weston, Mary persevered in her efforts to write poems and short stories. Although homesick for her native Shropshire, she was delighted that some of her writings were accepted for publication, and she gained in confidence. Mary began to formulate the plot of a novel to be set in the Shropshire landscape that she knew so well. Henry, for his part, found teaching both tedious and a distraction from his own writing.

Henry gave up his teaching post in 1914 in order to return to Shropshire, hoping for more leisure to write. The Webbs rented a small house at Pontesbury (near Shrewsbury) and planned to live on Mary’s £100 annual allowance, given to Mary by her mother, supplemented by sales of their writing. Mary concentrated on poems and imaginative short stories, while Henry composed poetry and worked on translations of scholarly works from other languages. After long mental incubation, Mary rapidly penned her first novel over a period of only three weeks. The Golden Arrow was published in 1916, when Mary was thirty-five. Critics reviewed the novel favorably. It did not sell well, largely because the reading public was distracted by anxiety over the Great War.

In order to help the war effort, Mary chose to sell their surplus garden produce at Shrewsbury market. For two years, Mary and Henry sold their extra fruit, vegetables, flowers, and honey from their garden. The work was physically strenuous. On Saturdays, Mary would walk the nine miles each way to Shrewsbury where she would listen, watch, and absorb the odd words and impressions in market dealings. As the cost of living increased with the war years, Henry and Mary became impoverished—especially because Mary was not temperamentally equipped to economize. She suffered great anxiety for her three brothers—Kenneth, Douglas, and Mervyn—who were then serving on the Western Front.

After 1916, marketing efforts ceased. According to Coles, Henry Webb escaped military service during World War I, partly on the grounds of ill health (due to his bad back and acute short-sightedness) and partly because he was one of the few men left to teach young boys (first at the King’s School in Chester and then at the Priory School in Shrewsbury).

Mary completed her second novel, Gone to Earth, during the year of the Battle of the Somme. Published in 1917, the novel (although set in Shropshire and never directly mentioning the war) is a passionate cry against man’s inhumanity to man. Rebecca West, in her review of Gone to Earth in the Times Literary Supplement, stated unequivocally “Mary Webb is a genius.” In a later symposium on novels for a leading London newspaper, West proclaimed Gone to Earth as “Novel of the Year” for 1917. Even though the novel was well received by critics, few people during wartime had the leisure or inclination to read fiction, and the booming guns of the Western Front drowned the voice of the poet. Mary was again disappointed by the lack of public attention for her books. She keenly felt her unique gifts, and was unhappy that her writing did not bring her the public recognition that she craved.

Because of the critical appreciation for her earlier two novels, Mary secured large advances from British and American publishers for her third book, The House in Dormer Forest (1920). She and Henry were able to purchase land on Lyth Hill south of Shrewsbury (with advance money, a loan from her mother, and a mortgage from the local bank) and build a small home that they named “Spring Cottage.” When reviews of The House in Dormer Forest were generally disappointing, Mary realized that critics had entirely missed her underlying premise—the need for man to break away from the “herd mentality” in order to realize his own individuality. Coles states in The Flower of Light (1978): “. . . there were no indications of awareness of the novel’s vital theme, no response to those insights and perspectives around which she had structured all and which she considered to be so important for the individual and for society.” Mary slipped into depression. Her doctor recommended a change of physical environment to rouse her from her melancholic lassitude, and Henry urged Mary to move to London, both for his sake and for the sake of her growing literary reputation.

In January 1921, the Webbs moved to London, planning to return to Spring Cottage for holidays and long weekends. As hoped, Mary’s health improved somewhat, and she began to meet people of standing in London’s literary and journalistic circles. Henry took up a teaching post at the King Alfred School in London where, according to Coles, he was immediately “slotted in.” Mary secured work writing literary reviews, essays, short stories, and poems for such London literary journals as the Spectator, the Nation, T. P. and Cassell’s Weekly, and the Bookman.

Mary Webb had dual motives for taking on review work; she sought to promote her literary reputation as well as to earn money. Despite being well paid for her novels, reviews, and published poems, the Webbs lived with mounting debt: they were maintaining Spring Cottage in Shropshire while also renting in London, and Mary gave unstintingly of whatever they had.

Mary was keenly sensitive to the needs and suffering of others. Her sympathy over time had steadily grown into a veritable passion for giving. Yet, Mary’s generosity did more credit to her heart than to her head as she gave extravagantly, often with little regard to her own or to Henry’s basic needs. Hilda Addison, in Mary Webb: A Short Study of her Life and Work (1931), quotes one of Webb’s friends as saying, “She might have twenty pounds in the morning and hardly ten shillings at night” (p. 41).

Mary’s fourth book, Seven for a Secret (1921), once again set in the Welsh border country, was dedicated to Thomas Hardy, with his permission. Mary wrote this novel during inspired weekends in Shropshire at Spring Cottage. She yearned for her Shropshire countryside when in London but, when in Shropshire, longed for Henry, who often stayed in London (initially because of his teaching schedule and, later, by preference).

In Precious Bane (1924), her most famous book and last completed novel, Mary Webb again demonstrates her knowledge of and love for her native county, its legends, and its customs. The story is told in the first person, and makes use of the vernacular of the Welsh border, learned by Mary when she was visiting country cottages in her youth and in the stalls of Shrewsbury market. Precious Bane was awarded the coveted Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Anglais early in 1925, an award presented by the French magazines Femina and Vie Heureuse, for the best English-language work of imagination published during the year by a male or female author whose work (in the opinion of a committee of eminent French women writers) had not received sufficient recognition.

Webb was building an admiring circle of literary critics, but public acclaim remained elusive. One of the few notable figures who did recognize Precious Bane as a work of genius was Stanley Baldwin, then British prime minister and a cousin to Rudyard Kipling, who had grown up near Shropshire. Baldwin recognized the insight, accuracy, and great beauty of the story and, in January 1927, wrote a letter to Mary saying how much he had enjoyed reading the novel over the preceding holiday. She replied with a letter of effusive thanks, accompanied by a gift of violets for his desk.

Webb’s diseased thyroid had been slowly poisoning her body. Pernicious anemia (then incurable) set in, diminishing Mary’s resistance, and leading to a rapid decline in her health. More than ever, as Mary’s body weakened, she needed her husband’s love and support. Mary was distressed by Henry’s infatuation with one of his young students and by his decision to spend extra hours after school privately tutoring the young girl at her family’s home. For his part, Henry answered his wife’s suspicions with an ever-increasing emotional distance.

Mary began Armour Wherein He Trusted at this time, set in the Welsh border country during the time of the First Crusades. Unlike her five already-published novels, whose story lines were developed over time but written quickly and with little revision, Armour Wherein He Trusted proved much more difficult for Webb. She suffered from vertigo, blinding migraine headaches and extreme fatigue, and changed plot course several times. In fact, Webb never completed this novel. It is a strange fragment, completely different in style from her other books. Armour Wherein He Trusted has an artificially contrived austerity—unlike the clarity, color, and warmth of her previous five novels. When compared to the vibrant portrayals of Shropshire life found in those other narratives, this story has the restrained feel of a watercolor. Webb describes the garden of Sir Gilbert Polrebec and his wife Nesta with great delicacy:

It clung like a nest, this my garden, to the grey wall of our castle, and it was grey itself with the quiet greyness of doves.  The lavender was all spiked over like a castle guarded by halberd-men, and the maiden pink held up fresh buds, the grey-leaved rose bloomed white beneath the heavy dews.  There were no citizens of the litel grey garden save Nesta and I, the grey-brown bees and the portly grey pigeons walking in the sun, like abbots.

Armour Wherein He Trusted (p. 99)

One day, Henry heard Mary speaking in great distress on the telephone to Arthur St. John Adcock, editor of the Bookman, saying that she could not finish the novel and, in despair, had torn it and thrown it on the fire. Henry retrieved the manuscript fragment of Armour Wherein He Trusted from the fireplace grate (cat. 148).

Mary spent her last summer alone at Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill in Shropshire. Henry, no longer in love with her, was estranged and remained in London. Webb died of pernicious anemia and Graves’ disease at the age of forty-six on October 8, 1927. Her death went largely unreported in the London press.

Yet Mary Webb left behind the rich posthumous gift of her writings.

In early 1928, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin mentioned to Sir J. M. Barrie and to John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir) how much he had enjoyed reading Precious Bane. Both authors, having known Mary Webb personally, told him that she was “one of the best living writers, but no one buys her books.”

Shortly after this conversation, Baldwin learned of Webb’s decease several months earlier. Surprised at the lack of press coverage upon her death, he paid tribute to Mary Webb’s “neglected genius” in a speech given at a Royal Literary Fund dinner in April 1928 where he castigated the press for the undeserved oblivion into which her work had fallen. Hearing in advance of Baldwin’s plan to praise Webb in his talk, Jonathan Cape informed her three other publishers (Constable, J. M. Dent and Hutchison) of his intention to publish a collected edition of Webb’s complete writings.

As Cape had calculated, Baldwin’s praise generated an immediate demand for Webb’s books. The wide reading public had finally “discovered” Mary Webb’s genius. The Evening Standardpublished a biographical review of Webb on June 8, 1928. The following day, the paper began to serialize her first novel, The Golden Arrow, which ran until August 1928.

To meet the demand for books by Mary Webb, Jonathan Cape rushed out a seven-volume collected edition of her work, which included Webb’s five previously published novels, the text of the novel fragment left unfinished at her death, a reprinting of her nature essays, a selection of her poetry, and some of Webb’s short stories. Famous men of the day who had personally known Mary Webb—Martin Armstrong, John Buchan, H. R. L. Sheppard, Robert Lynd, G. K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, and Stanley Baldwin—wrote the introductions to the collected edition, each volume of which became a bestseller in its own right. By December 1929, Henry Webb was sufficiently well off from royalties earned on the copyrights of Mary Webb’s books to retire permanently from teaching and devote himself to his own literary efforts. Henry later wrote four historical novels under the pseudonym of John Clayton.

In September 1929, Henry Webb, aged forty-three, married his then twenty-year-old former student, Kathleen Wilson. As Coles relates in detail in both The Flower of Light (1978) and Mary Webb(1990), the relationship between Henry and Kathleen had strained the Webbs’ marriage and caused Mary grief in her last years. Henry and Mary Webb were childless; Henry and Kathleen Webb had two children.

The reading public was eager for anything related to Mary Webb. With encouragement from his new wife, Henry sold the manuscripts and typescripts of Mary Webb’s poems and literary reviews. He also sold the manuscript fragment of her last novel, along with unpublished juvenilia and short stories. Such was the demand that Henry even sold his personal and dedication copies of Mary’s novels, as well as Mary’s “library”—the few dozen heavily-used, tattered books that Mary had acquired in childhood or had purchased to research the lore, history, flora and fauna of Shropshire.

According to Gladys Mary Coles, Henry and Kathleen Webb owned a home in Golders Green; a cottage in New Forest; a Bentley; and a yacht. The newly-wealthy Webbs also enjoyed traveling to Portofino, Italy to practice their Italian. In 1939, soon after editing A Mary Webb Anthology, Henry Webb died at the age of fifty-three in a fall from the pinnacle of Scafell in the Lake District. Coles suggests in the final chapter of her later biography (Mary Webb, 1990, p. 153), and in her published poem “To Henry Webb” (The Echoing Green, 1994, p. 67), that Henry’s fall may have been suicide. While the Coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death, Coles points out that this was Henry’s second “fall” in months. Mary Webb’s estate in 1928 was valued at £936, Henry’s estate (twelve years later) was appraised at £35,800. The almost forty-fold increase in value of Henry Webb’s estate, despite a very comfortable lifestyle, was due in significant part to royalties he received from Mary Webb’s writings.

Coles tells us that, in a twist of irony that would not have been lost on Mary Webb, Kathleen Webb (then a thirty-year-old widow with two children) inherited Mary Webb’s literary estate. In 1943, Kathleen married Mary Webb’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, later selling her Mary Webb copyrights to her new husband.

By a strange coincidence, Kathleen, like Mary Webb, died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

Mary Webb is buried in Shrewsbury cemetery.

A Lover of Roses
Here lies a lover of roses. All her years
She fashioned shrouds in a cellar underground.
At last she owns a rose-tree; all around
Where she reposes fragrant petals fall,
Clear pink and shelly and ethereal,
Raining upon the daisied grass like tears –
Only she does not know and cannot see:
Darker than any cellar lieth she.
Fifty One Poems (1946)