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Overview
In the early 19th century, young Prue and Gideon Sarn live with their mother on a farm around a mere deep in the Shropshire countryside. Their life is full to brimming with the agricultural round, the seasons dominating. Also crucial is all the lore which underlies life - meanings deduced from natural events, modified to some extent by the dicta of the church.
Prue is quietly aware of one essential difference in herself - she has a harelip, which her mother tells her sadly is the result of a hare having crossed her path when pregnant. Prue accepts that she will not have the fruitful life of love and children that a young woman of those times could expect. Gideon, after the death of their father, has shown his determined nature by enlisting Prue and their mother in an exhausting round of farmwork. His aim is to make a fortune quickly and buy a much grander house he has spied nearby, with all the servants and status that go with it.
Prue's admiration of her brother's strength and handsomeness does not waver, even when he is too single-minded to be truly kind. The daughter of their near neighbours, Jancis Beguildy, sees him similarly, but with added romantic attachment, which is returned by Gideon. Jancis' father is looked upon with great suspicion by the local community as a waker of demons and potential wizard, but, true to her all-welcoming nature, Prue is happy to go there regularly for lessons in reading and writing. On one visit there she also sees the new local weaver, Kester Woodseaves, who, like Gideon, is extraordinarily strong and attractive. Though she sees any romance as impossible due to her blemish, Prue is privately completely captured by the idea of him.
Prue and Gideon have the malleable ideas of those attached to the land, where strict church morality is seen as sometimes too restrictive and unreasonable, as long as the intentions of any misdoer are good. Jancis' father has taken against Gideon, for reasons which go back to a feud with their own father. When the physical nature of Gideon and Jancis' relationship prior to their marriage is revealed, something snaps in Beguildy. His revengeful action ushers in enormous disturbance - the tensions surrounding the Sarns and Beguildys in the local community, which had been sleeping, are awoken with savagery. Their quiet lives are devastated, their failings magnified, the impacts reverberating in ever growing circles of disaster. At the centre of the melée, it will take all her strength for Prue to survive.
In her last completed novel, first published in 1924, Mary Webb reached for two key differences from her prior work: a setting further back in time, and the use of a first-person narrator, bringing the beginnings of a new and extraordinary lucidity and immediacy to her already poetic prose. Precious Bane was a harbinger of brilliance to come, sadly cut short by Webb's tragic death.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780645751918 |
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Publisher: | Michael Walmer |
Publication date: | 07/25/2024 |
Pages: | 290 |
Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Book One
Sarn Mere 6
Telling the Bees 9
Prue Takes the Bidding Letters 19
Torches and Rosemary 22
The First Swath Falls 28
“Saddle Your Dreams Before You Ride ’Em” 36
Pippins and Jargonelles 43
Book Two
Riding to Market 49
The Mug of Cider 59
“Or Die in ’Tempting It” 67
The Wizard of Plash 73
The Love-Spinning 78
The Game of Costly Colours 83
“The Maister Be Come” 92
Raising Venus 97
The Game of Conquer 101
Book Three
The Hiring Fair 113
The Baiting 122
“The Best Tall Script, Flourished” 131
Jancis Runs Away 143
Dragon-flies 163
Book Four
Harvest Home 172
Beguildy Seeks a Seventh Child 188
The Deathly Bane 204
All on a May Morning 215
The Last Game of Conquer 230
The Breaking of the Mere 239
“Open the Gates as Wide as the Sky” 250