I read this book because I had been told that it was the main object of the satire of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. In fact, according to wikipedia, it is another novel by Mary Webb that was targeted.
I was also told I wouldn't be able to read the book because it was so ridiculous. This proved not to be the case.
It is melodrama. It is written in dialect. But it is well done. The dialect is consistent. The plot is well-constructed. The characters are credible. It won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1926.
Prue Sarn has a hare lip which disfigurement means she is unlikely to be able to marry. It also means that, although she is accepted within her close-knit farming community, outsiders view her as a witch (the book is set in the finals stages and aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, in the 1810s, in deepest rural Shropshire). It doesn't help that she is taught to read and write by the local 'wizard', Mr Beguildy, who scrapes a living by selling charms, live peep shows, and dodgy health advice.
After Prue's dad dies her brother, Gideon, takes over the farm, determined to make a lot of money and become gentry. He drives himself, and her, and his mother; his only soft spot is his love for Beguildy's daughter, Jancis, but her dad disapproves. Meanwhile Prue has fallen in love with Kester, the local weaver, who has himself alienated the community by putting an end to bull-baiting, the local sport.
Kester is rather too goody-goody, a shining knight who literally rides in on a horse to save his damsel in distress, but Gideon is a fascinatingly complex tragic hero, fearless, ambitious and hard-working, driven by money but conflicted by his love for Jancis. These people may be mommets driven by the demands of the melodramatic plot, but Webb has endowed them with life.
The rural setting was easy to parody by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm and by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop but Webb's descriptions are beautifully written and clearly based on her deep knowledge of the countryside; in this sense she's no worse and perhaps a little more accessible than Thomas Hardy.
The dialect is easy to parody too, but again it is perfectly done and from a position of knowledge. I thought it was a strength of the novel; I enjoyed:
- A tossy-ball: a ball made from entangled cowslips (other flowers are available) which can be lightly tossed into the air.
- Tuthree: two or three, compare with twartree from the Shetlan dialect of the Shetland Isles, a small number, a few
- Mommet: a puppet
- Swiving: cutting corn, harvesting, not to be confused with ‘swiving’ = copulating!
- Sin-Eating: at a funeral, a scapegoat - usually a poor man paid in bread and wine - pawns his soul to take on it the sins of the recently deceased.
- A love-spinning: when the women of the village get together to spin in celebration and in aid of a couple who are getting betrothed.
- Playing cards for cakes
- Pretending to be Venus, rising naked from a trapdoor, for the benefit of the Squire and his pals at a peepshow put on by Beguildy.
- A hiring-fair in which workers present themselves to employers to be hired, a bit like a slave market except for the fact that the workers are, at least in theory, free.
- “He said the past and the future were two shuttles in the hands of the Lord, weaving Eternity. ... But I think we cannot know what the past and the future are. We are so small and helpless on the Earth, that it is like a green rush cradle where mankind lies, looking up at the stars, but not knowing what they be.” (1.1)
- “It seemed a criss-cross sort of world, where you bury your father at night, and straightway begin to think of breakfast and housen and gold with the first light of dawn.” (1.5)
- “Saddle your dreams afore you ride ‘em, my wench.” (1.6)
- “ I hearkened to the blackbirds singing near and far. When they were a long way off you could scarcely disentangle them from all the other birds ... It was a weaving of many threads.” (1.7)
- “I be as I was made. None can go widdershins to that.” (2.3)
- “Maybe you've seen a dragon-fly coming out of its case? It does so wrostle, it does so wrench, you'd think it's life ud go from it. I've seen ‘em turn somersets like a mountebank in their agony. For get free they mun, and it cosses ‘em a pain like the birth pain, very pitiful to see.” (2.3)
- “She was the candle of his eye.” (2.3)
- “I was like a maid standing at the meeting of the lane-ends on May Day with a posy-knot as a favour for a rider that should come by. And behold! The horseman rode straight over me, and left me, posy and all, in the mire.” (2.3)
- “You may see flesh alone and feel naught but loathing. You may see it in the butcher's shop cut up, or in the gutter, drunken, or in the coffin, dead. For the world is full of flesh as the chandler's shelf is full of lanthorns at the beginning of winter.” (2.8)
- “The wounded look that is ever on the faces of men between the coming of the lust of the eye and its satisfying.” (2.8)
- “It's like the bran pie they give the Lullingford children, Christmas. You make get summat, but most likely you'll only get a motto. And if you get summat, ten to one it inna what you want, for what you want inna in the pie.” (2.9)
- “I be getting ancient and old, and the time draws nigh when life’ll be a burden.” (3.3)
- “When you dwell in a house that you mislike, you will look out of the window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.” (3.5)
- “I got up and put on my clo’es, for I supposed that whether it was the Judgement or not I’d better wear them, though in the pictures the redeemed go in their night rails. But I did feel that I must wait to get to heaven afore I could be at my ease to stand afore Sexton’s Sammy in my night-gown.” (4.2)
- “Only a fool will dip and dip in a dry well.” (4.2)
- “You’d as lief be dead as quick.” (4.3)
- Mother’s refrain: “Could I help it if the hare crossed my path?” (1.2 and later)
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