From the New Statesman
Gone to Earth
By Mary Webb
Virago 288pp, £7.99
Review by Rowan Pelling
Mary Webb is a stalwart of the second-hand bookshop. I defy anyone to enter
a dusty book emporium and not find a copy of The Golden Arrow, Gone to Earth
or Precious Bane. And there they stay. Despite praise from contemporaries
such as John Buchan, Rebecca West and Thomas Hardy, Webb's tendency to girlish
homilies and prose, which, if not purple, can be deepest lavender, has proved
unfashionable. Some of the more effusive descriptions would make Barbara
Cartland blanche. A coppice in spring becomes "radiant woods full of pale
colour, so delicate and lucent that Beauty seemed a fugitive presence from
some other world trapped and panting to be free".
Like that other great mistress of the overwrought sentence, Emily Bronte,
Webb is in thrall to her native soil. Shropshire is not so much the background
as the fabric of her novels, and Webb's description of rural life at the
end of the 19th century is what elevates her stories from the ranks of melodrama.
In terms of plot, Gone to Earth is very melodramatic indeed. Hazel Woodus,
the half-gypsy heroine, is a ravishing beauty who runs barefoot through
fields with a retinue of four-legged friends. Hazel, in turn, is pursued
by the virtuous but wet minister, Edward Marston, and by the wicked but
manly squire, Jack Reddin. Marston longs to protect her, while Reddin longs
to fill her up with tiny squires. Both have a measure of success before
it ends tragically with a pack of hounds and an ill-placed stone quarry.
(It's no wonder that the great British film director Michael Powell filmed
it as a superior bodice-ripper with Jennifer Jones and David Farrar in the
lead roles.)
When Webb writes that Hazel has "an almost unnaturally intense craving for
everything rich, vivid and vital", she could be describing her own need
to describe the world as she sees it. Every kitchen garden, hillside and
glade is lavished with painterly detailing of flora and fauna. Webb has
a flair, too, for conjuring the suggestive forces that environments have
on human motivation. The morally corrosive qualities of Reddin's home, Undern
Hall, spring from the very soil its foundations are rooted in. In May, "when
the scent of elder blossom, decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there,
the place attained one of its most individual moods -- narcotic, aphrodisiac".
By contrast, the sterile atmosphere of the minister's house at God's Little
Mountain is both cause and effect of his impotence. Nobody's libido could
be enhanced by a graveyard, "where stones, flat, erect and askew, took the
place of a flower garden".
Libido is something that Webb takes a lively interest in. Her prose style
may be archaic, but her philosophy is surprisingly modern. As Hazel tries
to fathom Reddin's hypnotic appeal, Webb deplores the sexual ignorance that
is Hazel's lot. She is equally robust about an artificial value system that
damns people for behaving as their nature compels them. Hazel can no more
help her strong attraction to Reddin than her tame fox can help stealing
ham. When Mrs Marston calls Foxy a "bad dog", Hazel retorts that she is,
in fact, a "good fox". And Webb scorns the lot of a young wife at the turn
of the 19th century: absorbed into a new family like a piece of furniture,
provided for without being consulted, brood mare and future keeper of the
ancestral china.
Gone to Earth is Tess of the D'Urbervilles without the moral baggage. Hardy's
Tess is defiled by her seduction, becomes a blousey trollop and has to be
killed off so that Angel Clare can marry her purer sister. But Hazel Woodus
has an innocence that goes much deeper. Webb kills her off because neither
Reddin nor Marston deserve her. Furthermore, Hazel is the first martyr of
the animal rights movement, sacrificing her life so that her pet Foxy shall
not be "cut in two and flung (a living creature, fine of nerve) to the pack
and torn to fragments". Every hunt sab should have a copy.
Rowan Pelling is the editor of "Erotic Review"
