Gone To Earth

Written in 1917, when all three of Mary Webb’s younger brothers were serving in the trenches of the Western Front, Gone to Earth denounces the callous inhumanity of “civilized” man. Webb’s second novel is a work of high imagination that reflects her horror at the slaughter of young soldiers, yet she never mentions the war that was devastating Europe at the time. Webb clothes her message in the setting and characters she knows best—Shropshire—and translates her anguish and compassion into poetic images.

The title of the book is taken from the hunter’s cry, “Gone to Earth!” when the fox has fled into its underground den. Webb cries out through this allegorical story: why do men, seeing something innocent and beautiful, seek to destroy it? At its most basic, Gone to Earth is the melodramatic tale of a country girl’s tragedy. Yet it is also a timeless, placeless morality tale of inhumane cruelty.

Gone to Earth tells of eighteen-year-old Hazel Woodus who lives in intuitive harmony with the creatures of wood and field. Hazel’s Welsh gypsy mother has died years earlier, leaving adolescent Hazel ignorant of the ways of the world. Hazel exists as an emanation of her landscape. She lives with her aimless father, Abel, and her pet fox, Foxy, in a tiny hovel far removed from regular human contact. Along with her mother’s book of spells, Hazel has inherited her deep kinship with the land. Hazel Woodus feels infinite love and pity for persecuted and hunted wild creatures and a burning hatred of all forms of cruelty. Local superstitions and legends have a powerful hold on her mind (as they do for most country dwellers in Webb’s novels). Hazel particularly dreads the Black Huntsman and the death pack, legendary beings who prey forever on the trail of the defenseless. She is doomed from the outset, destined to be hunted, a victim of the savagery of man.

Abel Woodus, Hazel’s father, is a man without ambition and untroubled by convention. He is an aimless coffin maker, harpist, and beekeeper. When a village child dies, Abel is happy because he can then meld his three skills into a show of purpose: coffin making, mournful and melancholy harping, and the construction of new beehives from the leftover coffin wood.

Hazel’s spontaneity, loveliness, and innocence attract two men —representing the opposing spiritual and physical sides of her nature—who compete for her attentions. Neither of them understands Hazel’s spirit:

She wanted neither. Her passion, no less intense, was for freedom, for the wood-track, for green places where soft feet scudded and eager eyes peered out and adventurous lives were lived up on the tree tops, down in the moss.

After her father threatens to kill Foxy for disturbing the chickens in their hen house, Hazel vows to marry the first man who asks her. Reverend Edward Marston asks for her hand in marriage. He respects the naïve young girl, and marries Hazel to protect her innocence. Out of mistaken chivalry, the simple preacher does not consummate his marriage, and fails to perceive that his new bride might hunger for physical intimacy as well as spiritual communion.

Responding only too willingly to Hazel’s puzzled yearnings, the dissolute Squire, Jack Reddin, overpowers Hazel and takes by force what Reverend Marston does not take by right. The sexually awakened Hazel now becomes a divided being, torn between her conflicting spiritual and physical needs. Hazel loves her husband’s kindly, tender, and sympathetic nature and she detests Reddin’s cruelty and savagery. Hazel is nevertheless torn—the innocent victim of passion—feeling that she belongs more to cruel Reddin than to Marston.

Hazel is finally repelled by Reddin’s brutality and returns to Marston, now pregnant with Squire Reddin’s child. In spite of shocked protest from his mother and from his congregation, Marston shields Hazel from their scorn. Yet Marston’s good intentions cannot protect his young wife in a world dominated by savagery. When Squire Reddin and his hunting party approach the rectory, Hazel mistakes them for the Black Huntsman and the death pack. In a panic, Hazel shields Foxy in her arms and runs in terror. However, pregnant Hazel cannot run fast enough to protect her pet from the pursuing hounds. Unwilling to allow Foxy’s dismemberment by the pack, Hazel leaps with her beloved pet over the quarry’s edge—to their deaths.

Mary Webb offers no vision of hope or peace in Gone to Earth, only “shivering echoes.” Her protest of man’s inhumanity to man, implicit throughout the novel, becomes at the last a cry of primeval fear that encompasses all—“a voice, awful and piercing, deep with unutterable horror . . . clutched the heart of every man and woman.” Webb’s description of Hazel’s tragic end is a masterpiece of word economy: “She was gone with Foxy into everlasting silence.”

With the publication of Gone to Earth, Mary Webb gained the attention of critics and secured an admiring, if small, following in the literary world. John Buchan appreciated Gone to Earth, caught by its “beauty of phrase and exquisite perception of nature,” the style “impregnated with poetry.” Reviewers commented: “Mary Webb is unquestionably a poet” (Robert Lynd); Gone to Earth is “a book rich at once in beauty and excitement” (Daily News); “the passionate beauty” of the novel “conceived in a mood of poetry and mysticism” (Gerald Gould); “it is as a poet Mary Webb must be judged. Her narrative is strange, fantastic, symbolical” (New Statesman); and “Gone to Earth is the most impressive novel since Thomas Hardy gave us Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It has many points of resemblance to Tess. The chief of these is its possession of the great secret of tragedy, mastered by the Greeks and lost and reconquered in these later years only in a few solitary instances” (New York Sun).

Rebecca West, in her review for the Times Literary Supplement (August 30, 1917) declared, “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.” Later in the same year, West proclaimed Gone to Earth as “Novel of the Year.”