Some Views of the Critics

“This year’s discovery has been Mary Webb, author of Gone to Earth. She is a genius, and I shouldn’t mind wagering that she is going to be the most distinguished writer of our generation.”

“She is equipped at every point with all the talents that go to the making of masterpieces . . . she has a style of exquisite beauty which has yet both force and restraint, simplicity and subtlety . . . she can moreover tell a story and so intrigue you with its sense of inevitableness that it seems more real than reality . . . She has, in short, genius. And though she has not yet come fully into her own, the day is surely not far off when she will be acclaimed as among the greatest of living novelists.”

“Mary Webb’s rich idiom and rhythm cannot be overpraised.”

“In all these novels she shows at times almost uncanny understanding of human character, an intense love of nature, a subtle art and imaginative power in picturing a scene, in the telling of a story, and a feeling for the magic of words, a beauty of style that none of her contemporaries surpassed.”

“Mary Webb had power; she could create beauty; and she is truthful concerning human nature.”

“It is by her understanding of spiritual truth that Mary Webb will stand or fall . . . She makes plain the motive of her writing, the desire for that subtle beauty which lies beyond the rim of the sky, and the passionate longing to share her experience of that miraculous sweetness. She was a nature-mystic, but her mysticism was no vague and formless refuge from reality . . . It makes clear for us the truth to which she wished above all to bear witness. For her God was expressed in natural beauty; and He was a loving God, offering strength to mankind through the earth, and made manifest in the stirring of the sap and the re-birth of spring. From this knowledge, and it is no less than knowledge, arises her intense pity for all hurt and suffering things, her passionate belief in a purposeful wisdom too deep for human apprehension, but revealed to those who listen for the voices on the wind. This mysticism suffuses her writings with a spiritual integrity and loveliness which is not often found outside the avowedly religious writings of the great mystics.”

“Her sensibility is so acute and her power over words so sure and swift that one who reads some passages in Whitehall has almost the physical sense of being in Shropshire cornfields.”

“The light in the stories of the Shropshire Lass is a light not shining on things but through them.”

“Impregnated with poetry . . . No one of our day has a greater power of evoking natural magic . . . Mary Webb need fear no comparison with any writer who has attempted to capture the soul of nature in words and to ‘tease us out of thought’ by glimpses into our ancient inheritance.”

“Mary Webb had that always fascinating quality of genius—imaginative energy. It is a quality so precious that when an author possesses it the waves of criticism beat against his work in vain . . . Her work is alive with the fiery genius of sympathy, pity, and awe . . . It is not too much to say that in her writings fiction becomes a branch of poetry.”

“Mary Webb, whose world was ‘a place of almost unbearable wonder,’ had senses almost microscopic in their delicacy. She could—most rewardful of feats—seize the momentary . . . Few writers indeed have left behind them so rich a posthumous gift.”

“. . . in the conflict between Gilbert de Polrebec’s spiritual self and his earthly love for Nesta . . . the two forces of her own character—as discovered in her earlier work—were curiously blended” . . . namely “a keen consciousness of physical life mingling and merging into spiritual ecstasy . . . Mary Webb had an imagination that broke down barriers; barriers of the spirit and barriers of time.”

“Mary Webb is my subject. She is undoubtedly one of the greatest women writers in English literature.”

“I could go on for a long time about Mary Webb. She has caused me more pangs of realization of sudden perfect beauty than almost any other writer, certainly any modern writer.”

“Her work is written upon a plane above that of the conventional novel . . . her books are all charged with feeling and understanding of an uncommon order.”

“The character of Prue Sarn [in Precious Bane] could not have been created by other than a genius . . . With Mary Webb’s creatures one
shares joy and sorrow as if they were our living friends.”

“For nothing is more characteristic of Mary Webb than lyrical joy in the beauty of the earth and a salty sense of life’s comedy.”

“As the reader of her books soon discovers, she had an eye of almost microscopic keenness for minute details—the centre of a small flower or the curve of an insect’s wing . . . She could certainly detect an exquisite perfume in flowers which, for most of us, are scentless.”

“The sense of the mysterium tremendum, the secret that’s never been told, is the essence of Mary Webb’s work. It is something beyond all natural beauty and beastliness, its glory glimmering through the gloom of our mortality.”

“Mary Webb might have been a novelist of rural life and manners,for her knowledge of rural life was first-hand, her acquaintance with ancient customs and intuitive sympathy with them comparable to Hardy’s; but alongside this straightforward human responsiveness there existed a fervent romanticism that knew man and nature as part of a reality greater than either. Her rejection of orthodox religion did not, however, issue in pantheism, but rather in a clothing of the landscape with human attributes, and the belief in a spiritual presence within nature less akin to Pan than to Jesus Christ.”

“Every so often one discovers something which strikes a chord so personal and so sacred that, though it is unfamiliar, it seems to
function as a fragment of a memory long lost. Such was my feeling
when I first came across Precious Bane, by Mary Webb.”