Precious Bane
By Mary Webb

I've just re-read Precious Bane, a book I first read back in 2013. It's a very beautiful book. I still haven't tracked down the BBC Radio dramatisation of it that I loved many years ago but the book is hard to beat really.

I don't have much extra to say about the novel except perhaps how it brought to mind Eliot's Adam Bede this time around. Like Eliot's book (which I assume Mary Webb had read), the setting is very rural and farm-based; there is a strong work ethic of the central male character. Both novelists manage to bring the natural world to a colourful and sometimes noisy life, although Webb focuses more on this through Pru Sarn, the "hare-shotten" woman at the heart of it. She has a deep and loving connection to the countryside and the animals in it. I loved the language even though I could not understand the meaning of some of the words used in the Shropshire dialect. Sad, beautiful, moving, tragic and, in the end, uplifting.